HinesSight

Hey, airlines: let me use my Kindle before 35,000 feet

It took me a long time to start using a Kindle. I never thought I'd enjoy reading anything other than books printed on paper.

But now I'm a convert -- for fiction, at least. (I still am addicted to highlighting paper pages of non-fiction books in my own personal colorful way, along with penning notes on blank endpages.)

It was a delight to use my Kindle Paperwhite during a recent Maui vacation. Not so much, though, on the five hour flights to and from Portland. 

Settling into my seat as the Alaska flight was about to take off, I pulled out my Kindle. I'd already put my iPhone into "airplane mode." Had no idea that my Kindle was a dangerous device.

"Sir, you need to put that away." The flight attendant was pointing at my Kindle. "Huh?" I said blankly. "It needs to be turned off before takeoff."

Not only then, I learned. All the way up to 35,000 feet. And once we started to descend below that elevation. Which struck me as seriously bizarre.

Not being able to read for twenty or thirty minutes, I had plenty of time to ponder the absurdity of the current electronic device situation on airplanes.

If my Kindle is a potentially dangerous object, why couldn't a terrorist make a Super Kindle filled with much more powerful electronic mayhem? No one actually checks to see whether cell phones, e-readers, and such are turned off as a plane takes off or lands.

It sure seems like either (1) no one should be allowed to take any sort of electronic device onto an airplane, or (2) everyone should be able to use whatever they want, at any time they want during a flight.

I vote for (2). If modern airplanes are so fragile that their safe operation can be threatened by the operation of common electronic devices, then fix the damn airplanes!

Thankfully, there are signs that sanity may eventually prevail at the F.A.A.:

One member of the group and an official of the F.A.A., both of whom asked for anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publicly about internal discussions, said the agency was under tremendous pressure to let people use reading devices on planes, or to provide solid scientific evidence why they cannot.

As I wrote in 2011, travelers are told to turn off their iPads and Kindles for takeoff and landing, yet there is no proof that these devices affect a plane’s avionics. To add to the confusion, the F.A.A. permits passengers to use electric razors and audio recorders during all phases of flight, even though those give off more electronic emissions than reading tablets.

...To guarantee that the F.A.A. follows through with its promise to relax the rules, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, said she planned to hold the agency accountable by introducing legislation.

In a phone interview, Ms. McCaskill said she had grown frustrated with the F.A.A.’s stance on devices after she learned that the agency now allows iPads as flight manuals in the cockpit and has subsequently given out devices to some flight attendants with information on flight procedures.

“So it’s O.K. to have iPads in the cockpit; it’s O.K. for flight attendants — and they are not in a panic — yet it’s not O.K. for the traveling public,” she said. “A flying copy of ‘War and Peace’ is more dangerous than a Kindle.”

Absolutely. 

City of Salem fails to provide good reason for Third Bridge

I asked a great question at today's DemoForum session on whether a Third Bridge is needed in Salem, Oregon. 

"Mr. Fernandez, what is the single most important reason Salem needs a Third Bridge? And please support your reason with some facts."

The answer City of Salem Public Works director Peter Fernandez gave was direct, concise, and straightforward. 

Also... proof that a Third Bridge isn't needed, just as No Third Bridge spokesperson Scott Bassett argued at the forum.

Consider this: Fernandez is a smart guy.

Also, he's an experienced engineer. He has been intimately involved with Third Bridge planning for years. He's speaking at a forum filled with people skeptical about the project. The Mayor and several city councillors are in attendance.

Public Works Director Peter Fernandez is going to come up with the very best answer he can to my question.

I asked for the single most important reason. Numero Uno. #1. The words most likely to make opponents of a Third Bridge think, "whoa, maybe we really do need this thing!"

So how did Fernandez respond?

By saying that the single most important reason is that there is only one way into and out of West Salem. Redundancy and safety were the top reasons a Third Bridge is needed. He said that the bridges are seismically unfit. Currently serious accidents on the bridge tie up traffic for long distances into neighborhoods on both sides of the river.

Sort of true.

But these are lousy reasons to spend $600 million or so on a Third Bridge. Scott Bassett explained why when he took the microphone in response to Fernandez' answer to my question.

Obviously Salem already has two bridges, or we wouldn't be talking about a Third Bridge. Fernandez' reference to one bridge probably meant that the current bridges each are four lanes going one way, westbound or eastbound. But Bassett pointed out that plans already exist for some lanes to be reversed on a bridge if an accident shuts down the other bridge.

Further, the Union Street walking/biking "pedestrian" bridge is capable of handling emergency vehicles. And there is another bridge across the Willamette in Independence, about twenty minutes away. So a $600 million Third Bridge wouldn't offer much additional redundancy.

[Update: here's a Vimeo video of the DemoForum session. My question is asked and answered at about the 55:00 minute mark.]

A new bridge would, however, be much more likely to survive the 9.0 Big One earthquake which will hit western Oregon eventually. It isn't a question of "if," but of "when." The geological historical record proves that.

Bassett addressed this issue in his remarks. The current bridges need to be retrofitted. He said they were designed to remain standing after a powerful earthquake, but not to remain usable. (Of course, many roads likely won't be usable after the Big One either.)

The situation is akin to what my wife and I faced. We live in a house that was built in the early '70s, before building codes required stricter earthquake standards. Instead of buying a newer house, we spent way less to retrofit our home and garage.

Peter Fernandez' answer to my question points to the wisdom of doing the same thing with the current bridges: retrofit them; this can be done for tens of millions rather than hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Bassett discussed improvements to the road connections that could be made at the ends of the current bridges. These would take care of congestion problems -- even though tellingly, Fernandez did not mention traffic congestion in his Most Important Reason response.

Bottom line: today the City of Salem Public Works director admitted that the most important reason to build a Third Bridge isn't a very good reason. Redundancy and safety concerns with the current bridges can be resolved without constructing another bridge across the Willamette.

Watch this instructive No Third Bridge video to learn more about why Salem doesn't need a new bridge.

  

Putting parking meters in downtown Salem is a dumb idea

There are things I wish downtown Salem (Oregon) had more of: night life, throngs of people, cool shops and art galleries, vegetarian-friendly restaurants, street musicians.

Parking meters... that's something I've never wished for.

Yet the City of Salem is determined to force paid parking down downtown's throat. Why? The reason remains a mystery, like other recent ill-advised City decisions.

US Bank got an approval to cut down five large beautiful trees in downtown Salem. For no good reason. Three years ago the City's Public Works director, Peter Fernandez, made a promise to the US Bank president that the trees could be removed. 

Then flimsy reasons were conjured up in an attempt to justify the tree-killing decision. Same thing is happening with Third Bridge planning: a decision to build another bridge, which would channel people away from downtown, has been made without considering better and cheaper transportation alternatives.

Now we've got a rush by the City to install parking meters downtown. Again, with little or no consideration of whether this will solve the purported problems meters are supposed to solve; and with little or no listening to the downtown businesses that will be affected by a shift from free to paid parking.

The Downtown Parking Task Force project began hopefully enough last year. The original intent was to listen to the public first, to both the business owners and the customers. Hear them share their needs and dreams, perhaps in our Library’s auditorium, and from those conversations, develop potential strategies at open meetings.

Instead, Task Force and city staff members met at 7:30 a.m. in the library’s lower-level Anderson Room; seated in a “U” with their backs to the public they were meant to serve. As the months passed there was never an opportunity for the public to speak. 

Recently the Mayor, City Manager, members of the Parking Task Force, and other proponents of parking meters met with the Statesman Journal editorial board. I watched the entire hour-plus video of the session. I came away unconvinced that meters are needed.

Unfortunately, the Statesman Journal followed its usual policy of being on the side of whatever the City of Salem leadership and Chamber of Commerce are for, whether or not the public interest is being served. The resulting editorial, though annoyingly wishy-washy, supported moving ahead with parking meters -- even though it acknowledged that this could turn out to be a bad idea.

The Parking Task Force didn't survey downtown business owners to ask how they thought parking meters would affect them. Shameful.

Such is par for the course these days with the City of Salem. Expert advice and citizen input are ignored; the US Bank tree-killing debacle and looming Third Bridge disaster are further examples.

Read what downtown business owners and other citizens think about downtown parking meters here and here. These informed comments provide a lot of ammunition to shoot down the parking meter proposal. I have some additional skeptical bullets:

(1) Currently four large downtown businesses, such as Penney's, pay most of the parking tax that supports downtown parking garages and other parking expenses. If meters are installed, that tax goes away. This amounts to a wealth transfer to large corporations at the expense of downtown visitors. Penney's will save over $40,000 a year.

(2) Reportedly the Convention Center pays nothing for parking, yet benefits from the City parking structure right across the street. Other governmental entities apparently pay nothing for parking either. Why should big business and big government get a free parking ride?

(3) The main reason parking meters are being recommended by the Task Force is to pay for the capital and operating costs of downtown parking structures, which currently provide free parking to visitors. So why aren't parking meters planned for the structures? Why should onstreet parkers feed their meters in order to provide free parking to people who use the structures?

Now there is free onstreet parking, and free offstreet parking in the structures. If parking meters make downtown onstreet parking costly, then offstreet parkers should incur the same cost. After all, the purported purpose of the meters is to meet the cost of maintaining and operating the parking structures.

Those who use the structures should pay much or most of the costs associated with them. Logically, this seems obvious. Yet the Parking Task Force didn't recommend this. Here's my conspiracy theory about why:

In my experience as a frequent downtown visitor, the structures are more likely to be used by people heading to large businesses such as Penney's, and to the Salem Center mall. After all, skybridges connect the structures to these places.

There is no skybridge from a parking structure to the small businesses I have frequented for many years: RJ Dance Studio, Venti's, Beanery, Pacific Martial Arts, Great Harvest, etc. I use onstreet parking when I go to these small businesses, because it is much more convenient. And very rarely, if ever, have I had to park in a structure because I couldn't find an onstreet parking space.

Thus my suspicion is that the City of Salem is tilting toward large businesses, and away from small businesses, in this parking meter proposal. By using onstreet meter revenue to subsidize free parking in the structures, Penney's, Salem Center, and the Convention Center will continue to have free parking easily available to their customers -- while not having to pay any parking tax. 

Yet it is small businesses that make downtown Salem as attractive as it is. And it is small businesses which should be supported by City of Salem policies. Downtown Salem is on the edge of being vibrantly ascendent. It also is on the edge of sliding downhill.

Which side downtown moves toward will be affected by how attractive the area is to visitors, and thus to businesses. 

Already the City has authorized the killing of five beautiful trees that used to grace downtown's State Street. And the City is determined to build a Third Bridge that would funnel people away from downtown toward Keizer Station and points north.

Now the City wants to install parking meters, which means large businesses wouldn't have to pay their fair share, or indeed any share, of downtown parking costs. I'm not saying the City of Salem hates downtown small businesses. But I can understand why someone would come to that conclusion.

Don't elect Planned Parenthood haters to Salem-Keizer School Board

If you're a Salem-area resident who cares about providing the best education possible for our children, in the May 21 election be sure to vote for Cris Brantley, Nancy MacMoriss-Adix, and Rick Kimball.

They're running for the Salem-Keizer school board. Each is in favor of the district's Teen Outreach Program, TOP -- which is demonstrably effective:

TOP CURRICULUM
The TOP Changing Scenes Curriculum addresses many important teen topics, including:
  • Healthy relationships
  • Values
  • Communication
  • Examining influences
  • Goal setting
  • Decision making
  • Adolescent development and sexual health
  • Community service

TOP IS EFFECTIVE
TOP has demonstrated the following results:
    •  53% reduction in the risk of teen pregnancy or fathering a child
    •  52% reduction in the risk of school suspension
    •  60% reduction in the risk of course failure

I can't understand why anyone would be in favor of more teen pregnancies, school suspensions, and course failures. But some people (including write-in candidates) running for the Salem-Keizer school board are.

That's why it is important to vote for Brantley, MacMoriss-Adiz, and Kimball. Be sure to deposit your ballot at a drop site, because it is too late to mail your ballot and be sure it will arrive by May 21.

As reported by the Salem Statesman-Journal:

The health program is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is taught by a school district teacher with help from a Planned Parenthood facilitator.

But those who hate Planned Parenthood, an organization that is highly effective in reducing both unwanted pregnancies and abortions through education about responsible sexual behavior and birth control, have falsely claimed that Planned Parenthood is "teaching health classes."

Anyone who doesn't respect truth shouldn't be on a school board.

Elect Cris Brantley, Nancy MacMoriss-Adix, and Rick Kimball. They care about educating children, not about pushing their own extreme political agenda and lies about the TOP program.

My Salem Weekly opinion piece about US Bank tree killings

I only had one request to make of the Salem Weekly editors: if you have to shorten my opinion piece about the City of Salem's outrageous approval of a US Bank request to cut down five beautiful Zelkova trees, please...

Don't take out my references to Tony Soprano and the Bada Bing Club. Pretty please. With New Jersey mobster frosting on top.

Happily, they didn't. "A promise is a promise" was published almost exactly as I wrote it. Here's the first Soprano's reference.

There was no good reason to remove the trees. None. Three times the city’s Shade Tree Committee recommended pruning them, not killing them. Salem’s urban forester agreed. So did independent arborists. Neighboring business owners wanted the five trees saved.

So why did Public Works director Peter Fernandez approve US Bank regional president Alan Allbritton’s application to have the trees removed? Here’s where the story starts to sound more like the New Jersey of Tony Soprano than supposedly squeaky-clean Salem.

Now, I want to assure Peter Fernandez and Alan Allbritton that I don't believe they are engaged in truly nefarious dealings. Some hyperbole and exaggeration is par for the course in most sorts of writing. 

But mildly nefarious? Sure. 

When I've described what happened here in Salem to people unacquainted with our city, the reaction has been "Wow, the tree cutting sounds so sleazy." 

My point exactly. 

Peter Fernandez ignored the thrice-repeated recommendation of the Shade Tree committee. Admitting that US Bank’s sidewalk liability concerns weren’t pertinent to his decision, he conjured up some pitifully weak reasons to cut down the trees. Each reason screamed “prune” to arborists, not kill.

Then the City of Salem sent a letter to tree removal opponents notifying them of Fernandez’ approval. Outrageously, it arrived on the very day of the appeal deadline. An attorney has told me that opponents had grounds to appeal. But its damn tough to appeal a City of Salem decision when you’re notified about it too late to legally do so.

In the grand scheme of things it could be argued that cutting down healthy large trees for no good reason doesn't rank very high on the scale of Outrageous Acts.

That may be.

However, this episode is a window that provides a view into how the current leadership of the City of Salem -- mayor, city manager, department heads, councilors -- go about making public policy decisions.

How much do they value citizen testimony? To what extent do they pay attention to facts and expert advice? Do special interests have more sway than the broad public interest? Are "political" decisions made first, with reasons drummed up later?

Time will offer up better answers to these questions.

Debate over a Third Bridge and downtown parking meters is continuing, and will heat up. How the City handles these issues will tell us a lot about whether Tony Soprano-style deal-making is taking hold in Salem.

Salem's Third Bridge planning staggers on to likely demise

If I was a betting man -- and Vegas placed odds on ill-advised city public works projects -- I'd put money on the City of Salem's Third Bridge project going down in well-deserved flames.

I wasn't able to attend last night's City Council hearing on the project. But thanks to a hot-off-the-blog post from Salem Breakfast on Bikes, I got a good feel for the increasing desperation of Third Bridge proponents.

With opposition increasing by the day, it's telling that Public Works director Peter Fernandez now is calling the latest iteration of the bridge/quasi-freeway design, the "Salem Alternative." Sounds like the $100,000 a month planning team is trying to earn its keep.

I'll admit that Salem Alternative has a better ring to it than 4-D, or whatever the heck the previous preferred design was called.

(If they'd called it 44-D, maybe at least the Third Bridge would have gotten a thumbs-up from subscribers to Big Boobs magazine; so far the vast majority of Salem-area residents appear to be saying No! to this $700 million waste of taxpayer money.)

But no matter what the Third Bridge is called, some plain facts remain: it isn't needed; it isn't wanted; and it can't be afforded. 

Statesman Journal editorial about 3rd Bridge "not even wrong"

Ooh! Here comes my theoretical physics-based putdown: "You're not even wrong!" Take that, Statesman Journal editorial board. 

Today's opinion piece about a proposed Third Bridge in Salem was so confusingly argued, it deserves the "not even wrong" -- a phrase attributed to physicist Wolfgang Pauli when he objected to incorrect or sloppy thinking.

Here's how I put it in my online comment on the editorial, "Third Bridge Remains a Sound Project."

The SJ says the bridge "remains a sound concept." Yet the SJ editorial admits ...

-- It won't be built for 15-20 years.
-- No one knows if it will be needed then.
-- No one knows if it will be wanted then.
-- No one knows if it can be afforded then.

Yet somehow something that is questionably needed, wanted, and afforded is a "sound concept"? This reflects a basic problem with how the Salem establishment (City Council, Statesman Journal, Chamber of Commerce) views the world.

A desired future for Salem is lacking. The public isn't involved in forming a coherent, consensual, community vision for the sort of place we want to become. Instead, we get more of the same -- reactive disjointed planning that responds to short-term "political" pressures (using that term in a broad sense) rather than long-term aspirations.

Playing into this, the editorial urges Salem to pursue a Third Bridge that isn't needed now, isn't wanted now, and can't be afforded now, yet maybe, perhaps, just might be, in 15-20 years -- for reasons unknown and unspecified. 

Instead of saying "THIS is the Salem we want to become, and THIS is why the Third Bridge is needed to help make that happen," advocates of the Salem River Crossing rely on vague assumptions about what might occur a few decades from now, hoping that somehow current plans for an unneeded, unwanted, unaffordable bridge will meld with an unknowable future.

Here's an alternative idea: form that future, rather than react to it. Listen to what Salem area residents want. Do we want a strong downtown, alternatives to automotive travel, thriving businesses and residences in walkable communities along the river? 

Decide what sort of place we want Salem to be, then, if necessary, design a river crossing that will enhance that vision.

I wrote those thoughts before coming across a Salem Breakfast on Bikes post along the same lines. Here's some excerpts from "SJ Fails to Take Own Advice: Whiffs on Third Bridge."

From an earlier note yesterday [by SJ editorial page editor Dick Hughes] on assault and reporting at Willamette:

But that also was a lesson for student journalists: To be effective, they can't just spout off. They have to back up opinions with evidence and they have to present all sides of an issue.

Instead of talking right over "objections to the project" and dismissing them by fiat and circular logic -"the bridge is needed" because we need a bridge! - the SJ refuses its own advice to "back up opinions with evidence" and "present all sides of an issue." 

(At least they did publish a counter-point from 1000 Friends just below the editorial, but is significant they did not hold one of those "editorial board" lunchtime meetings with critics and with supporters.  It's hard to see that the SJ has taken strong measures on both the reporting and the editorial side to investigate the project thoroughly.)

...WESD [Willamette Educational Service District] and Courthouse Square have got tons of reportorial resources applied to them.  The proposed giant bridge and highway is in cost more than an order of magnitude greater, hundreds of millions rather than tens of millions. 

By this calculation it is reasonable to ask whether 10x the staff time should be allocated to investigating claims and intellectual honesty in the DEIS [draft Environmental Impact Statement] about the giant bridge and highway!  The case is far from proved, and the SJ has an actual job to do in "backing up opinions with evidence" on a once-in-a-generation sized project.

Maybe most crucially, it is far from proven that Salem has done all it could do.

I'm sure there are good arguments to be made for building a Third Bridge. But I haven't seen them yet, and the Statesman Journal editorial didn't make any. 

A trend is evident when the SJ expresses its newpaper'ish collective opinion on important issues: the editorial board takes a position, but not a stand. This deserves the insult, "not even wrong." (See my post about the SJ's endorsement of Mitt Romney in 2012; also "not even wrong.")

Why? Because someone who is open and straightforward in arguing for a position either can convince others that she is right, or can be convinced that she is wrong -- since arguments based on facts and reasons can be rebutted.

The Statesman Journal's shaky "position" on the Third Bridge is that it's worth continuing to look into the possibility of another bridge across the Willamette, because maybe, someday, perhaps 20 years from now, it might be needed, wanted, and affordable. 

Though none of those things is true now. 

The SJ's maybe, someday attitude is at odds with the Third Bridge timetable on the Oregon Department of Transportation web site. Looks to me like a final decision is scheduled for mid-2014, with design and construction happening immediately after. 

As some commenters on the editorial said, given the importance of this issue the newpaper's editorial board should have sat down with proponents and opponents of a Third Bridge. Let each side make its best case. Assess the facts. Ponder alternative futures for downtown, west Salem, and other parts of Salem.

Then write a firm, factual, reasonable editorial that doesn't pussyfoot around.

Should Salem design, build, and pay for a Third Bridge, or not? Explain why the Statesman Journal came down on the side that it did. Then people can debate how valid those reasons were, and how accurate the facts backing up those reasons were.

Instead, readers of the Statesman Journal were given an editorial so wishy-washy it wasn't even wrong. Because being right or wrong means taking a coherent position on some subject, and the SJ didn't do that.

GOP efforts to politicize Benghazi result in... nothing new

Yawn. That's the right reaction to the unceasing efforts by Fox News commentators and other Republicans to convert the Benghazi tragedy into some sort of impeachable offense.

Isn't working. Recent GOP hearings have told us what we already knew.

Politicians love few things better than a scandal to trip up their opponents, and Republicans hope last year’s fatal attack on U.S. diplomats in Libya will do exactly that to Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats.

History suggests it might be a tough lift. The issue is complex, the next presidential election is more than three years away, and a number of reports and officials have disputed criticisms of Clinton’s role when she was secretary of state.

...A major independent inquiry largely absolved Clinton of wrongdoing.

The findings incensed many Republican leaders and conservative news outlets, who portray Benghazi as a simmering scandal about to erupt.

The three officials testifying Wednesday offered little that has not been aired in previous congressional hearings. Afterward, Republicans all but acknowledged they’re still seeking a knockout punch.

...On Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin showed little concern about the larger impact on politics. ‘‘I don’t think there’s a smoking gun today,’’ he told the House panel. "I don’t think there’s a lukewarm slingshot."

Nice metaphor: the trailer for the hearings promised a lot more than the actual "movie" delivered.

The pretense was, of course, that this is all about national security and a dastardly Obama campaign electioneering scheme followed by a coverup. The problem, to mix entertainment media for a moment, is that the trailer for the hearing, as is so often the case, promised to deliver a lot more than we ultimately got.

Days ahead of time we'd been told the then-deputy chief of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya, Gregory Hicks, would blow the whistle on the allegedly feckless response to the attack. Foxaganda, CBS and other media reported Hicks was furious that no jet fighters had been scrambled to fly over Benghazi to make the attackers of the U.S. consulate and CIA Annex there wet their pants and flee.

And he also was incensed about the military's order to Special Operations soldiers to "stand down" rather than get on a flight from Tripoli to Benghazi where they would reinforce the CIA operatives and Libyan militia fighting the attackers.

But well before he sat down in front the microphone, Hicks knew the answer for why the jets hadn't been scrambled: They couldn't have gotten there in time, something examined in full by the Accountability Review Board's independent report.

As for the Special Operations guys, they weren't some fully outfitted Delta Force unit ready to obliterate the men who had dared attack American facilities. They were just four guys in all, no doubt brave and eager to go. But they weren't combat ready, being armed solely with 9mm sidearms. If they had left on the plane for Benghazi, they would have arrived too late to save any lives.

It's impossible to believe that Hicks wasn't, eight months after the fact, fully aware of the reason those four weren't sent.

Meanwhile... carbon dioxide levels surpass 400 ppm. But this doesn't require hearings, according to Republicans. Because Benghazi.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Arborist demolishes City of Salem's reasons for removing US Bank trees

I've said it many times before, and I'll likely be saying it many times more:

There was no good reason for the City of Salem (Oregon) to approve a request by US Bank to remove five healthy, beautiful, large Japanese Zelkova trees.

All signs point to the decision being politically motivated. That's shameful. Being an avid fan of The Sopranos, I would expect decisions by local officials in New Jersey to be politically slanted. But here in Oregon we expect cleaner city government.

Below you'll find the expert views of Woody Dukes, an arborist for 39 years, 25 with the City of Salem.

Woody testified at the January 9 meeting of the City's Shade Tree Committee, which three times -- three -- recommended that the Zelkovas be pruned rather than removed. Yet Peter Fernandez, City of Salem Public Works director, somehow granted US Bank regional president Alan Allbritton's removal request.

Allbritton is the incoming president of the Salem Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce is a big backer of the City of Salem's crusade to spend $600-800 million on a Third Bridge across the Willamette which hardly anyone other than the Chamber and Realtor's Association believes is needed.

In 2010 Fernandez promised Allbritton that the five US Bank Trees would be removed, even though Allbritton hadn't gone through the prescribed application process. 

After Allbritton did, and tree experts (along with the Shade Tree Committee) said "prune, don't kill," Fernandez kept his promise to the US Bank President -- while breaking any promise he may have made upon taking office to put facts and the public interest above special interests. 

Here's some information from long-time city arborist Woody Dukes which will strengthen the suspicions of so many tree and bird lovers that the City of Salem and US Bank had no good reason to cut down the trees.

Two remain. They need to stay. Nothing will bring back the three trees which have been killed. Saving the last two trees may restore some measure of good will toward City officials and US Bank. 

---------------------------
Excerpts from an email message arborist Woody Dukes sent me:

Hi Brian. I went through the Shade Tree Advisory Committee minutes from the Jan 9, 2013 hearing at Pringle Hall with regard to the Ladd & Bush Bank request to remove the Zelcovas on the State St side of their building.

I also went through the "Background, Findings and Decision regarding the removal of the State Street Trees (302 State Street S: Ladd & Bush Building—US Bank) from March 12, 2013 that came from Peter Fernandez, Director of Public Works for the City of Salem [quoted in red, along with Allbritton quotes].

Here is what I gleaned out of them:

From Peter Fernandez in his "Findings" on March 12, 2013:

"1. Aesthetics. There is a difference of opinion between the tree removal proponents and opponents as to the aesthetic quality of the trees. One faction believes that the mature trees provide a visual appeal. The other believes that the difference in size between the Commercial and State Street trees creates a poor aesthetic."

The City allowed the trees on the Commercial St side to be removed. The differences in sizes directly relates to the removal of those trees, not the remaining ones on State although that is now the case.  

"While the aesthetics of mature trees may be debated, the record indicates that “the [zelkova] trees have grown beyond their anticipated design."

How do they know that these trees have grown beyond the anticipated design? I was told by Wilbur Bluhm, one of the committee members that decided on the locations and genus/species of trees to be planted in this program that these Zelkovas were chosen specifically for the bank. He is one of the most respected horticulturalists in the area if not even broader recognition. He was a consultant for the "Sunset Western Garden Book".

(Also Professor Emeritus, Oregon State University Extension Service, and Horticultural Consultant, Board Member, Rhododendron Species Foundation, member of the Native Plant Society and teaches Horticulture part time at Chemeketa Community College.)

"3. Additional maintenance requirements due to leaves and roots. The proponents of removing the trees state that the existing trees create additional maintenance requirements due to dropping leaves in the fall and root encroachment into the stormwater drainage facilities. Any deciduous tree planted in the public right of way, by definition, will create leaf litter in the fall." 

The City accepts this basic issue with all trees.

"The record indicates, however, that the Princeton Sentry Ginko trees planted on Commercial Street drop their leaves in a more concentrated manner than the existing Japanese Zelkova trees. ... The record also indicates that staff believes that at least one of the Zelkova trees may, in fact, be impacting the stormwater drainage facilities at this location."

Why not remove all trees and plant Princeton Sentry Ginkgo trees if this particular leaf-drop problem is 'corrected' by such replacement? Does this mean that any and all future tree removals in the downtown core (and elsewhere) will be replaced by these ginkgo trees?

Has it been proven "in fact" that stormwater drainage facilities have been impacted by the tree(s)? What impact? What is the plan to correct this impact after removal of the offending tree(s)? In FACT, there are NO storm drains on the State Street side of the bank.

Are they saying here that the possible impact is to below-ground infrastructure? Can we see in writing what this impact consists of? 

If trees are going to be removed, the reasons must be concrete and the tangible damage be shown both in writing and with visual evidence of said damage incurred with proof that the tree(s) is/are all or in part responsible. Permits for any action should not be issued on such 'loose' or speculative language.

---------------------

From Ryan Allbritton's testimony at the Jan 9th STAC hearing:

"Three years ago they had requested all trees on Commercial Street and State Street (adjacent to the bank) be removed and were told by the City officials to hold off on the State St side for two reasons; one being an issue in the community of having all nine trees taken out at once and that future curb work on State Street would require the removal of the remaining trees. The City replaced the curb along Commercial Street and then replanted small trees. The bank was told they could do half the tree removal now (i.e. 2010) and could do the other half in two years (i.e. 2012)." 

The bank, as they stated in their testimony on Jan 9th before the Shade Tree Advisory Committee, said that they "had a deal". From what is written here, it seems to me that there was a "deal" and that Fernandez's decision on March 12th 2013 was actually made in 2010.

[boldface emphasis added by me, because this shameful seeming fact needs to be emphasized]

"They [US Bank] are now asking the City through the STAC's recommendation to let them replace the trees that are on the North side of the building in fulfillment of the agreement they have with the City [in 2010]. The curb on that side has been worked on but is not complete and they state the city will need to remove them to fix the curb; it causes a liability to their customers and the citizens as a whole."

The City has already performed the work of replacing the curb without any major issues with tree roots AND without removing the trees.

From Brian Hines' piece quoting Peter Fernandez in his decision to issue the permit:

Fernandez says sidewalk liability concerns are “not pertinent to the tree removal decision." Yet US Bank officials have been telling people that the trees needed to be cut down for this reason.

I believe that Fernandez should have taken the advice of the STAC [Shade Tree Advisory Committee] and had the trees pruned.

They probably would be improperly pruned by removing more than the recommended maximum of leaf removal of 25% each year because they would have been raised all around, reduced in height by some unknown amount and pruned back from the building. Then, if the work performed was not satisfactory, the bank should have been allowed another appeal to (try and) press their case again.  

Michael Davis promises to revitalize Salem Statesman Journal

Last Friday I spent an enjoyable hour at the Salem City Club, watching Michael Davis, the new executive editor of the Statesman Journal, charm everybody in the room (so far as I could tell). 

I sat in the back. Since this wasn't an expressive gospel-spouting church service, I didn't jump up, throw my arms in the air, and yell "Praise be!" "Hallelujah" "Tell it like it is, Brother Michael" or such.

But I felt like it. Instead, I kept muttering to my closest seatmate Yes, Good, Absolutely, and other affirmations of the fresh vision Davis has for how the Statesman Journal will handle news and opinion.

Before the talk I'd told my new City Club friend (I joined recently, partly because Loustic Catering offers up a great lunch with a vegetarian option) that the Statesman Journal had refused to publish in its print edition an opinion piece I'd written with Carole Smith about the City of Salem's atrocious decision to approve US Bank's request to cut down five beautiul healthy downtown trees for no good reason.

So I listened carefully for signs that even though this time the Statesman Journal had said "no" to a well-written, timely, provocative opinion piece about a local issue that has attracted widespread interest, such won't happen again.

I came away feeling pretty good.

Davis said that he's only been in town for six weeks. That isn't long enough to shake things up at a newspaper that needs some rocking and rolling. I suspect Davis is feeling his way along, getting to know both Salem and the staff of the Statesman Journal.

Michael Davis previously was executive editor of the Lafayette Journal & Courier in Indiana.

This is another Gannett paper which, unsurprisingly, has a web site that looks almost exactly like the Statesman Journal's; so the SJ's online presence will look familiar to Davis, given that Gannett takes a cookie cutter approach in this area.

Along this line, at the City Club meeting Davis was asked how the items on the Statesman Journal's national page of news that comes from USA Today, also a Gannett paper, was chosen. Davis replied that it isn't the Statesman Journal's choice, though he wishes it was.

The SJ's web site design and USA Today's force-fed page shows that Davis doesn't have complete freedom to remake Salem's newspaper. But from his City Club remarks, it sure sounds like he is out to change the paper's "corporate culture."

Which hasn't reflected the moderate make-up of the Salem-area citizenry, almost equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, progressives and traditionalists. 

I agreed with most of his "newbie" insights into the town I've lived in or near since 1977.

Salem is cooler than it appears to outsiders, especially those who compare it with Portland or Eugene. Our creative class (not a great term; best I can come up with) is largely hidden away in isolated outposts of artistry, eccentricity, and cutting-edge expressiveness.

It sounds like Davis wants to expose this Other Side of Salem, which has mostly been ignored by the Statesman Journal's news and opinion reporting for as many years as my senior citizen mind can remember.

I'm reminded of the familiar humorous phrase, reality has a liberal bias. Yet it isn't funny when inconvenient truths get downplayed by what Davis correctly called our "paper of record."

Meaning, the Statesman Journal hasn't been nearly as passionate about reporting unseemly goings-on associated with conservative City of Salem or Marion County elected officials as the paper has, say, with the Willamette ESD -- which has been taken to task for a myriad of sins, many of them much less serious than, say, allowing Courthouse Square to fall into virtually complete ruin, or, say, conspiring to ruin downtown (I'm thinking Third Bridge, parking meters, and killing of trees, plus meddling with downtown association activities)

So kudos to you, Michael Davis, for saying all the right things last Friday. I believe that you really do want to make the Statesman Journal into a newspaper for all area residents, not just "the 50%" on the right side of the political spectrum.

Shake things up enough, and I might even be able to forgive the newspaper's extremely poorly argued 2012 endorsement of Mitt Romney for President. (Note: I said might; that editorial will be long remembered by me as an example of poor journalism.)

What Statesman Journal doesn't want you to read about US Bank trees

Being a writer, I'm used to rejection notices. But this one hurt more than usual.

Because the cause I had written about was saving the last two beautiful US Bank trees in downtown Salem, which are on the chopping block after the City of Salem granted the bank's request to cut down five marvelous Zelkova trees.

The City's Shade Tree Committee said no, no, no to the request. Three times. The City's urban forester and independent arborists said any problems with the trees could be addressed by pruning, not killing them.

Download Shade Tree Committee minutes 

Yet Peter Fernandez, Salem Public Works Director, approved the tree removals anyway.

This was after the regional president of US Bank, Ryan Allbritton, reminded Fernandez that three years ago he had promised Allbritton the trees would be removed -- leaving aside the inconvenient fact that the City's tree ordinance requires that removal requests in the downtown Historic District go through the Shade Tree Committee, not be approved via Imperial Fiat by Fernandez.

The whole affair reflects very poorly on the City of Salem and US Bank.

But Carole Smith, a downtown businesswoman and resident, and I hold out hope that the city and bank can salvage some good will from the psyches of appropriately outraged tree-loving citizens by letting the last two trees remain.

(They apparently are still standing only because migrating birds, which seem to have more legal rights than trees, are sheltering in the Zelkovas; when the birds go, so do the last two trees.)

Wanting the public to be as informed as possible about the injustices being inflicted on both the trees and Salem residents who value them, I wrote a 500 word guest opinion, got an OK from co-submitter Carole, and sent it off to the Statesman Journal a few days ago.

Here it is. (I'll also include it as a continuation to this post.)

Download Opinion piece - US Bank trees

Last night an editorial page staffer said that our piece had been rejected for the print edition. I fired off an intense email asking why. Our guest opinion was timely, factual, well written (in my non-humble opinion), provocative, and indicative of broader problems with how City of Salem staff function, or not, as public servants.

I was told by editorial page editor Dick Hughes that with the Oregon legislature in session, the Statesman Journal has gotten quite a few guest opinion submissions. In response, I again appealed to Hughes and executive editor Michael Davis that a timely local subject of interest to the Salem community deserves space on the paper's opinion pages.

Maybe the Statesman Journal will put our guest opinion online. Maybe Carole and I will be able to have letters to the editor published.

[Update: later today Dick Hughes emailed me that our piece was online at the Statesman Journal web site. Of course, it also would have been if the newspaper had chosen to publish it in the print edition. So Carole and I are thankful. But not that thankful. Links to other stories and letters to the editor about the removal of the US Bank trees can be found here.]

And maybe those last two trees will be cut down before people in Salem are aware of what a horrible decision it was to remove the five US Bank trees rather than prune them, as tree experts recommended.

Years ago Peter Fernandez made a promise to Ryan Allbritton that he would accede to the incoming President of the Salem Chamber of Commerce's request to cut down the trees. Well, I've made my own promise: to the two remaining trees that I will do what I can to save them. 

Bad public policy decisions are more difficult to carry out when the public is broadly aware of them. Thus Carole and I want to make as many people as possible in Salem aware of how unnecessary and unjust the death-sentencing of five beautiful downtown trees is. 

Pass on the word. Legally we may not be able to stop the remaining trees from being cut down. However, as we say in the opinion piece:

Nothing will bring back the three wonderful trees that have been reduced to stumps. However, at the moment two equally beautiful trees remain at the corner of State and Commercial. 

Since there was no good reason to cut down any of the five trees, that no-good-reason has been reduced by 60% with the destruction of three trees. Some good will for the City of Salem and US Bank can be salvaged if they belatedly acknowledge this.

Please, Peter Fernandez, City Public Works Director, and Ryan Allbritton, US Bank regional president: save the remaining trees. 

If they too are cut down for no good reason, their absence will speak volumes about how solid facts, expert advice, and public testimony mean next to nothing in how the City of Salem operates these days.

[Update: Ryan Albritton can be contacted at james.allbritton@usbank.com; Peter Fernandez at pfernandez@cityofsalem.net]

Read on for the rest of our guest opinion...

Praise be to obsessively committed citizen activists

A few weeks back I was asked by a reporter, "Do you think you're going to make a difference?"

Then we talked about why I've been so intensely focused on trying to save the last two beautiful US Bank trees in downtown Salem (three have been cut down for no good reason; there is even less reason than that to kill the remaining trees). 

I didn't get much of a chance to answer that first question, other than to say "Sure."

After spending a few hours yesterday listening to Thom Hartmann, a progressive radio talk show host and author, speak here in Salem, I'm motivated to spend some blog time pondering why us citizen activists do what we do.

Hartmann talked quite a bit about Move to Amend, an effort to amend the United States Constitution to affirm that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.

Local Move to Amend folks had tables set up in the Grand Theatre lobby. They're working hard to get Oregon's state legislature to be the second, after Vermont's, to support Move to Amend. 

That's a long way from passing a constitutional amendment. But praise be, from the deepest recesses of my non-religious heart, to activists who work so long, so hard, so diligently, so quixotically -- tilting at windmills that seemingly are next to impossible to attack with any hope of success.

Until that "seemingly" is shown to be false. And the windmills crumble after countless lance strikes.

Nothing is impossible for the obsessively crazed activist who refuses to stop fighting for his or her cause until the last drop of determination is drained from their being. Just look at how resistance to gay marriage is finally crumbling after so many years of apparently fruitless efforts.

As Barry Goldwater famously said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." We all remember the Chinese "Tank Man."

Did he have any chance against those tanks? No. Did he feel that he had no choice but to do what he did? Almost surely, yes. Did he make a difference? Yes, yes, yes!

After all, I'm inspired and energized by him. So are countless others. I hope he's still alive. But if he's not, if he was killed by the Chinese authorities, he lived as we all should: bravely, whole-heartedly, standing tall for truth, liberty, and justice in the face of oppressive power.

I can give reasons for why I've spent so much time, energy, and money fighting for causes that seemingly have little chance of success. However, I don't believe citizen activism can be explained. 

It is felt, not thought. Experienced, not a subject of exposition (though, yeah, as a blogger I guess I'm doing just that). Much more of an ungraspable energy than a solid analyzable entity.

I tilt at windmills, and sometimes succeed in stopping their turning, because I'm incapable of doing anything else. I bet most citizen activists feel the same. Artists make art because artistry drives them. Activists make waves because a calm sea of injustice drives them to stir things up.

Often, when I'm trying to right some unrightable wrong, I wonder whether I'd be happier spending my retired days doing something more pleasant. It doesn't take me long to realize, no, I wouldn't. Pleasantness is great, but I need more to be truly happy.

The rest of the lyrics to Impossible Dream, as familiar as they may be, express what lies at the heart of a citizen activist better than any other words I could end this post with.

It isn't success that an activist truly yearns for, but the feeling that at the end of the long day called Life, one's eyes can close in peace -- having been focused on the pursuit of what really matters, even if the quarry remained just out of reach.

DON QUIXOTE 
It is the mission of each true knight... 
His duty... nay, his privilege! 
To dream the impossible dream, 
To fight the unbeatable foe, 
To bear with unbearable sorrow 
To run where the brave dare not go; 
To right the unrightable wrong. 

To love, pure and chaste, from afar, 
To try, when your arms are too weary, 
To reach the unreachable star! 

This is my Quest to follow that star, 
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far, 
To fight for the right 
Without question or pause, 
To be willing to march into hell 
For a heavenly cause! 

And I know, if I'll only be true 
To this glorious Quest, 
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm 
When I'm laid to my rest. 

And the world will be better for this, 
That one man, scorned and covered with scars, 
Still strove, with his last ounce of courage, 
To reach the unreachable stars!

Senate filibuster rule sucks -- it killed expanded gun background checks

It's frustrating to see headlines like, "Senate fails to pass gun control legislation." Not true. The expanded background checks bill was supported 54-46, a clear majority.

Only problem is, under the Senate's stupid filibuster rules and current Republican intransigence, it takes 60 votes -- a supermajority -- to do anything substantial.

So bills "fail" when they really "passed." Why Democrats put up with this crap is beyond me.

If Republicans were in control of the Senate and White House, and Democrats were preventing presidential nominees from even being voted on, along with bottling up almost every piece of important legislation by filibustering, I'm pretty damn sure severe limits on the filibuster would have been passed long ago.

But weenie Democrats in the Senate apparently prefer to preserve the illusion of belonging to the "world's greatest deliberative body" (a huge lie), than do what needs to be done to get the Senate doing the people's business, like it should be.

Ezra Klein talked about this in "The gun bill failed because the Senate is wildly undemocratic."

The gun vote didn’t fail because a couple of red-state Democrats bolted, or even because too many senators are afraid of the National Rifle Association, or even because Sen. Pat Toomey couldn’t bring along more Republicans.

Those factors help explain why the gun vote didn’t clear the extraordinary bar set for it to succeed. But they’re not the main reason it failed.

The gun vote failed because of the way the Senate is designed. It failed because the Senate wildly overrepresents small, rural states and, on top of that, requires a 60-vote supermajority to pass most pieces of legislation.

The Manchin-Toomey bill received 54 aye votes and 46 nay votes. That is to say, a solid majority of senators voted for it. In most legislative bodies around the world, that would have been enough. But it wasn’t a sufficient supermajority for the U.S. Senate.

...It’s easy to question the strategies of the gun bill’s architects, but the truth is they compromised repeatedly, sought support widely and openly, worked hard to address criticisms and allay concerns, and did everything in their power to marshal public opinion on their behalf. They did what they were supposed to do.

But then the Senate did what it is built to do. It took a bill supported by most Americans and killed it because it was intensely opposed by a minority who disproportionately live in small, rural states.

Oregon first state to decriminalize marijuana. We're green! (in many ways)

When I came across this map that shows the spread of liberalized marijuana laws in the United States, the first state that turned light green leapt out at me. 

Oregon! (click on image to activate; or check out the Atlantic Wire story that has the map).

Indeed, Wikipedia confirms that the year I moved here, 1973, was when Oregon kicked off the national trend of decriminalizing and, recently, legalizing recreational marijiuana. In addition, a bunch of states (including Oregon) have OK'd medical marijuana for certain conditions. 

Today the Oregon state Senate passed a bill that would let people with post-traumatic stress disorder get medical marijuana cards. The ignorance of some Republican legislators about medicinal marijuana is shown in this quote from the story.

Sen. Alan Olsen, R-Canby, said while he understands the responsibility to help people with this disorder he remains skeptical about whether marijuana should be used as medicine for PTSD.

“You know you could sit down with a bottle of Jack Daniels and listen to Charlie Daniels and probably get the same effect,” Olsen, a former narcotics investigator, told lawmakers.

I don't know how much marijuana you use, Sen. Olsen, but whatever the quantity is, you need to toke up more.

Obviously you haven't experienced the difference between drinking a bunch of toxic alcohol, and ingesting a natural herb whose active ingredient triggers brain receptors, some of which reduce pain (along with increasing pleasure, and without those nasty whiskey side effects.)

Leave cougars alone, Oregon legislators. Kill HB 2624 instead.

Here we go again. Another session of the Oregon legislature; another misguided attempt to undo the voter's banning (twice!) of using dogs to hunt cougars.

And once again, legislation in search of a problem to justify it. House Bill 2624, introduced by Rep. Brian Clem of Salem, would let counties out of the statewide ban if voters in a county approved this.

Yet nobody has ever been killed by a cougar in Oregon. Cougar complaints are declining. 

Opponents called the bills unnecessary because complaints of cougar encounters are down while cougar kills are up, according to state statistics. They said the bills would undo the will of voters, and they questioned the state's ability to count cougars accurately.

Scott Beckstead, Oregon director of the Humane Society of the United States came armed with data from the state that show a steep decline in the number of cougar complaints, from a high of 1,072 in 1999, to 287 in 2012. Over the same period, the data show, the number of cougars killed by hunters has risen from 157 to 242.

Voters didn't bar cougar and bear hunting, Beckstead noted. And they allowed the continued use of dogs to hunt problem or dangerous animals, he said.

"These bills go far beyond that," Beckstead said. "They allow the use of dogs and bait for sport. The voters of Oregon have said they don't want that."

Cougars benefit Oregon's environment. They are part of the balance of nature. They cause very few problems for humans. People are hugely more dangerous to people. (See here, here, here, and here.)

As I said in a previous post:

Pop quiz: how many people have been killed by a cougar in Oregon? Is it (a) 126, (b) 18, or (c) none.

From all the hysteria over "managing" the cougar population (which really means needlessly killing them), you'd think the answer would be greater than zero. But it isn't.

No one has ever been killed by a cougar in Oregon. Many people have been killed by hunters. So if we're really concerned about protecting human life, there should be a thinning of the ranks of hunters, not of cougars.

Irrational hysteria is the only reason this bill has been introduced. My wife and I live around cougars. I've walked by fresh cougar deer kills. I frequently take walks at night in woods frequented by cougars. I'm not afraid of cougars.

Hopefully legislators will become similarly educated about these valuable top predators before they vote on HB 2624. Just as wolf management shouldn't be based on "big bad wolf" fairy tales, neither should cougar management.

Cougars can't contact Oregon legislators. But you can. Speak for them. Prevent needless killing of these marvelous animals. Predator Defense tells you how to do it. Click on that link. Now.

Even though an April 2 public hearing already has been held, legislators on the Oregon House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee need to hear that people don't want the ban on hunting cougars with dogs, and bears with bait, to be overturned. 

Their email addresses are here.

Oregon should restrict those who want to restrict abortions

The crazier conservative-leaning states become, the happier I am to be an Oregonian.

My state isn't perfect, that's for sure, but by and large it hits the right balance when it comes to personal freedom and social responsibility.

Case in point: Oregon is the only state that hasn't limited a woman's access to abortion services. Repeat, only state.

This chart makes my green, moist, fern-infested heart beat with pride (I live in western Oregon; eastern Oregon has a different climate).

There Oregon is, way down at the bottom, showing zero on the type of abortion restrictions. Take that, Washington state -- which has one type of restriction. You've gotten legal gay marriage and marijuana before us, but at least we win on this personal freedom front.

Let's not rest content, though.

I was pleased to read today that the Oregon legislature is considering SB 490, which would require so-called "crisis pregnancy centers" (they provide no health services and promulgate false information about abortion) to be up-front about what their so-called "services" are, and to keep personal medical information private.

Among those testifying in support of Senate Bill 490 was Dr. Jim Lace, a Salem pediatrician and legislative chairman of the Oregon Medical Association. He said crisis pregnancy centers often provide only over-the-counter pregnancy tests and ultrasound tests, and generally are not staffed by medical professionals.

He said such centers often advise women that abortion causes breast cancer and future infertility, or that condoms do not prevent pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases.

“These claims are not supported by peer-reviewed medical research and lack any disclaimer or notification to this effect, thus limiting the woman’s choice and jeopardizing her health and safety,” Lace said to the Senate Health Care and Human Services Committee.

He also said that unlike medical professionals, such centers are not bound by federal requirements for confidentiality of personal medical information.

SB 490 is an excellent idea. I hope it passes. It's long past time to give those who want to meddle in women's health care decisions a taste of their own medicine. 

These "crisis pregnancy centers" want to tell pregnant women what to do. So let's make sure that they honestly tell these women what they really are offering.

SB 490 requires that notices be prominently posted which describe whether the center provides each of the following:

(a) Contraceptive drugs or devices that are approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration;

(b) An on-site consultation with a [medical] practitioner listed in subsection (2)(b)(A) of this section;

(c) Adoption services or referral for adoption services; and

(d) Abortion services or referral for abortion services.

These notices would make clear to anyone who walks in that this really isn't a "crisis pregnancy center." It is a biased, limited, judgmental, moralistic anti-abortion center whose core, if not sole, purpose is to talk women into having a baby -- regardless of whether this is what the woman wants, or is in her best interest.

These anti-choice fanatics don't provide a wide range of pregnancy services. Yet women can easily be fooled into believing that they do. SB 490 would make it much more difficult to pass off an anti-abortion center as a "crisis pregnancy center."

Let's restrict the ability of those who want to restrict the ability of Oregon women to freely choose what to do when they become pregnant. Pass SB 490.

Disturbing graphs of U.S. health care prices compared to other countries

Just about six more months. Until I'm eligible for Medicare. The part of the United States health care system that works the most efficiently and effectively. Because prices are regulated. I can hardly wait.

Today Ezra Klein shared "21 graphs that show America's health care prices are ludicrous."

For sure.

It's bizarre that Congressional Republicans like Paul Ryan want to make our absurdly expensive health care system even more centered on the largely unregulated  private insurance system that is bankrupting our country.

Compared to other industrialized countries we're paying way more for health care, and getting less health benefits. Conservatives should be outraged by this waste of public and private dollars, not trying to make the situation worse. 

Here's a graph that shows how much more of our GDP goes to health care than, say, in Canada or the United Kingdom.

Why marijuana laws should be left to the states

As officials in Washington and Colorado proceed with plans to sell state-regulated marijuana, they're nervously looking over their shoulders at Attorney General Eric Holder, wondering how the Justice Department is going to handle a seeming conflict between federal law (pot is illegal) and their state laws (pot is legal).

An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times does a good job of explaining why there really isn't much of a conflict between the states and the feds here. The authors should know what they're talking about. Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the UC Irvine School of Law. Allen Hopper is criminal justice and drug policy director of the ACLU of California.

Here's some excerpts from "On Pot Laws, Respect the States" by Chemerinsky and Hopper.

It may be surprising, but no state is required to have a law making possession of marijuana, or any drug, a crime. Therefore, any state can legalize some or all marijuana possession if it chooses. The federal government, if it chooses, can enforce the federal law against its possession and use, but it is up to each state to decide what to criminally prohibit, based on the 10th Amendment.

...There is not a conflict when one level of government prohibits something but another level of government does not. An easy illustration is that murder is a crime in every state, but, except for very specific circumstances, it is not a federal crime. No one would say that there is a conflict. Likewise, a state can decide that certain conduct does not violate state law even if it offends federal law. It is then for the federal government to decide how, if at all, it wants to enforce the federal law.

...Several other states, including California, have laws making possession of up to an ounce of marijuana an infraction punishable by a fine, even though under federal law, it's a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in federal prison. Similarly, 17 states and Washington, D.C., have laws that allow possession of marijuana for medical purposes; there is no such federal exception. Although the federal government can enforce the stricter U.S. law in states that have decriminalized possession or have medical marijuana laws, it has never acted to have those state laws invalidated based on the preemption doctrine.

Simply put, no state has to have a law prohibiting marijuana, even though federal law does. And if a state does have such a ban but wants to repeal it in whole or in part, such as for possession for medical reasons or for small amounts, it may do so.

...Beyond the legal arguments, there are policy reasons for the federal government to not interfere with the Colorado and Washington laws. An important feature of federalism is that states are empowered to serve as laboratories for experimentation with social policies. As the nation embarks on perhaps the most significant public debate about drug policy since President Nixon declared the war on drugs, Washington and Colorado's experiment should be allowed to go forward. The country can then assess whether it succeeded or failed.

Nate Silver says Oregon has only 5% chance of beating Louisville

Uh, oh.

Prediction guru Nate Silver doesn't give the Oregon basketball team much of a chance at beating top seed Louisville in their Sweet 16 matchup. Odds of winning the 2013 NCAA championship are much less, .06% (in boldface).

Oregon (up to 0.06 percent from 0.01 percent) Those who complained that Oregon was underseeded have plenty of evidence in the form of wins against No. 5-seeded Oklahoma State and No. 4-seeded St. Louis. However, the Ducks’ punishment from the bracket makers is not over, as they’ll have to travel across the country to face the No. 1 overall seed, Louisville; the model gives them only about a 5 percent chance of winning that game.

Well, I haven't watched Louisville play this year. But I've seen as many Oregon games as my Pac-12 Network deprived DirecTV receiver allowed. 

And I like how the Ducks are looking, especially the last two games. Still, Silver probably is about right with his slim probability of Oregon beating Louisville. 

Part of what gives me hope, though, is how likely Silver thought, before the tournament began, that Florida Gulf Coast University would make it to the Sweet Sixteen: 3.3%. Now FGCU is the adored underdog of the tournament.

In the Sweet Sixteen. 

I believe... Surprise Nate Silver, you Ducks.

Senate Democrats need to fix the stupid filibuster

I'm a cranky Democrat today. This headline in the Los Angeles Times deeply irks me: "Obama court pick withdraws, thwarted by Republicans in Senate." As does the quote from Obama I'll include in the story excerpt.

Former New York state attorney Caitlin Halligan, President Obama’s choice for the U.S. Court of Appeals here, withdrew her name Friday, defeated by the Republican minority in the Senate.

Halligan’s withdrawal is the latest example of how the GOP has employed the filibuster rule not only to block major legislation, but routine presidential appointments as well.

The D.C. Circuit decides significant challenges to federal regulations, including those on environmental protection and worker’s rights. Obama is the first president who has been unable to put a single judge on the court.

The Constitution says judges are to be nominated by the president and confirmed by a majority vote in the Senate. Halligan had the support of the Senate’s Democratic majority, but minority Republicans blocked a vote to confirm her. Under the Senate’s rules, it takes 60 votes to close debate and set a final vote.

Obama issued a statement saying he was “deeply disappointed that…a minority of senators continued to block a simple up-or-down vote on her nomination. The D.C. Circuit is considered the nation’s second- highest court, but it now has more vacancies than any other circuit court. This is unacceptable.”

Ooh! President Obama is deeply disappointed... he calls it unacceptable that he can't even get a vote on his nominations to the D.C. Circuit Court (along with other courts).

Now the Republicans who are abusing the filibuster will stop! They have to! Obama and Senate Democrats are deeply disappointed! 

Yeah, right.

The not-so-GOP has been engaging in this sort of filibustering crap ever since Obama was elected. I've got a blog post record of how my crankiness over the filibuster has been festering for several years.

2011: Senate Dems should get tough on GOP filibustering

Elections are won by the candidate who gets the most votes. Control of the House and Senate is determined by which political party has the most candidates elected. But in the Senate, majority rule is dumped in the crapper. 

Nowadays it takes 60 votes, rather than 51, for the Senate to do anything significant, because Republicans have decided that obstructionism is their best bet for making sure Obama is a one-term president.

2012: End the Senate filibuster. Or at least reform the damn thing. 

"Majority rules." Makes sense to me. I can live with that. In both the House and the Senate.

Do away with the Senate's stupid filibuster custom where 41 out of 100 Senators have veto power over what legislation will be passed by Congress, and whether Presidential nominations of administration officials and judges will be confirmed.

Now, here we are in 2013, watching the Senate Republicans try to run out the clock on Obama's second term, so far successfully denying him the constitutional right to nominate judges and have the Senate confirm or reject them on an up-or-down vote.

Kudos to Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley for making such a recent valiant attempt to reform the stupid filibuster so senators at least have to stand up and talk about whatever they want to stop.

And anti-kudos to Senate President Harry Reid, plus other wimpy Democrats, who did essentially zilch about the Republican abuse of the filibuster.

I don't see why it's necessary at all. Do away with the whole damn thing. The Senate has a weird notion that it is the "world's greatest deliberative body." That's complete bullshit. There's hardly any deliberating going on.

There can't be, not when forty senators can prevent a vote on what's being deliberated. 

I'm fine with respecting the will of the majority. This leads to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls "skin in the game" in his book, Antifragile.

Meaning, if someone takes a stand, this position should bring that person rewards if it works out well, and penalties if it doesn't. If the Democrats pass legislation that turns out badly, they should be punished at the polls in the next election. Or re-elected, if voters like what has happened.

Same applies to Republicans. Let whoever has been entrusted by the American public with a majority in the Senate be able to pass legislation and confirm presidential appointments with a freaking majority vote.

What's wrong with that? Doing something is a hell of a lot better than doing nothing, because at least when you do something, you learn from the results. Gridlock is stupid politics, because no learning is going on. 

If Senate Republicans don't like a bill, or a nominee, they can vote "no." If voters approve of that stand, they'll reward the GOP senators. If voters disapprove, they'll express their displeasure at the polls. But filibustering, preventing any vote from happening, that's cowardly "no skin in the game" politics.

It's failing to get in the ring and fight. It's wimpering, "I don't want a bout to happen, because I'm pretty sure I'm going to lose." Look: if you want to win votes in the Senate, win elections first. Again, this should apply to either Republicans or Democrats.

Democracy needs to be restored to the Senate. Until this happens, I'm going to continue to be an episodically cranky Democrat.

Judge rules against Clackamas County on light rail vote

Good news: the Tea Party-inspired phobia against extending light rail to Clackamas County got some pushback from a judge who, unlike the county's newly elected right-wing commissioners, understands what "contract" means.

Hopefully those commissioners now won't be so eager to spew crazy talk about voters being able to ignore legally binding agreements. Judge Deanne Darling slapped them down in a recent ruling.

Clackamas County circuit Judge Deanne L. Darling ruled this week that the ballot title on an advisory light-rail measure the Clackamas County Board of Commissioners placed on the May 21 ballot is “insufficient and unfair.”

Attorney and Oak Grove resident Keith Garza claimed that the measure, as written by the county in February, was misleading because it implies that a public vote can change contractual obligations the county signed in 2010 and 2012.

...Judge Darling on March 19 certified a description of the proposed ordinance to make clear to voters that “approval or rejection of the ordinance will not affect the county’s obligations with respect to [Clackamas County’s] previous contractual commitments.”

“The court’s ruling reaffirms that the county’s promises are binding and that Measure 3-401 does not require an authorizing vote before the county actually does what it already said it would do," Garza said. “It was critically important to me that voters know that they are being asked to cast their ballot for something that won’t have any legal effect.”

Congratulations to Keith Garza for showing that a single informed, reasonable citizen has the ability to get politicians back on track when they forget about following the rule of law.

This time it was Republicans who abused their power, but power belongs to the people no matter who is trying to take it away.

Eugene newspaper looks at Salem's riverfront development (quoting me!)

Ah, there I am, on the front page of yesterday's Eugene Register Guard, pondering the future of Salem's riverfront, wondering whether the re-development of a Boise Cascade industrial area into a mixed-use zone will succeed in revitalizing a part of Salem that could add so much to downtown living, working, and playing.

OK, not true.

Actually I was wondering whether the newspaper's photographer was going to make me look like an old geezer/derelict (albeit in waterproof REI gear) hanging out at a fence overlooking Minto Brown Island Park, pondering the pros and cons of taking my pack and tarp into some bushes by the railroad tracks.

Which is pretty much how I ended up looking. Fine with me. I am who I am, just as Salem is who it is. In each case, for both better and worse.

The story by Diane Dietz, "Riverfront letdown: Salem's ambitious mixed-use development project fizzles," tells the tale of how the dream of a really cool riverfront area with condos, restaurants, grocery store, paths, and other enticing amenities has shrunken to the reality of rental apartments and a medical rehabilitation facility.
Download Riverfront letdown | Local News | The Register-Guard | Eugene, Oregon 

My quotes in the story relate to what could have been, but almost certainly won't be.

Brian Hines, a Salem resident and blogger, imagined a gracious scene, as in Paris or, at least, San Antonio, with a waterfront strung with walking paths and bejeweled with restaurants.

“You could go down and walk around at night and be connected to downtown,” Hines said. “You could sit down in a nice restaurant and watch the lights.

“Developers come in with their little boards and make it all look wonderful.”

...A half-razed Boise Cascade building continues to “uglify” the prominent corner south of downtown Salem, Hines said.

...“Now, they’re going to have a fence that blocks off people from the development,” Hines said. “You’re rolling along on your roller blades or your stroller, and you want to go through the development. You can’t. There’s going to be locked gates, even gates for the paths. ...

“It’s going to be a shadow of what was promised back in 2009.”

Then there are depressing quotes from the lead developer, Jason Tokarski. 

No restaurants will offer a riverside meal.

“That’s one concept that we have thoroughly vetted and that we simply cannot get interest in from either local (restaurants) or national franchises,” said Jason Tokarski, who is overseeing the development now for his family’s Mountain West Investment Corp.

...Consequently, the Tokarskis are chastened. They’re reluctant to show watercolor renderings of development plans.

“I want to be careful that we are not showing something that gets everyone excited,” Tokarski said. “Over the years, it has been difficult to reframe the project in the public’s eyes and to help the city staff and the community understand what would really work on the site — given the economic challenges that persist.

“Salem is not a high-rent market, whether it’s commercial or retail or apartments. It’s not Portland, and neither is Eugene.”

This is what drives me nuts about Salem, a town that has continually disappointed me during the 36 years I've happily lived here (yeah, I'm like a psychologically-split battered denizen; I keep getting beaten up by the city I've shacked-up with, and choose to return for more).

Salem is a city that doesn't believe in itself.

Now, cities aren't conscious beings, so what I really mean is that too many people in Salem don't believe in themselves. They long for a more vibrant town, both culturally and economically, yet are all too willing to accept dashed dreams when their longings are tossed in the trash can of half-assed development.

I readily admit that I'm not a real estate developer.

My wife and I were investors in Salem's Sustainable Fairview, another mixed-use development that has failed to live up to expectations, but owning a few shares in a LLC is a lot different from going way out on a financial limb, like the Tokarski's are doing.

So I'm sympathetic to the attitude, "the market does the deciding." This theme runs through the first story in the Register Guard's two-part, two-city riverfront analysis: "Eugene looks to denser development by floating River City: Eugene explores mixed-use development on the Willamette."

The dream of the Riverfront Master Plan crafted by as many as 1,000 Eugene residents over a two-year period is beautiful, but translating it into reality could be difficult.

The Lane County economy is improving, but developers and banks remain wary. What they see as feasible on the 27 acres of riverfront recently mothballed by the Eugene Water & Electric Board may end up nothing like the public’s vision.

The master plan vision, illustrated in watercolors, shows multistory condominiums over a lively retail district with shops, a restaurant row, a boardwalk and a riverfront “people” area.

...Yet for any development to succeed, there has to be demand, said Ward Beck, commercial real estate broker with Windermere Real Estate of Lane County. For the project to pencil out, landlords have to get sufficient rents.

Beck’s mantra: “If the math doesn’t work, there will be nothing built.”

Beck predicts a 70 percent likelihood that the riverfront plan will sit on a shelf, and only a 30 percent chance that some kind of construction will happen.

“The chances are virtually zero that what ends up being developed will look a lot like the plan,” he said, adding, “It’s beautiful, and it would be nice.”

Yes, it sure would be nice.

To have the Salem and Eugene riverfronts be places that draw people in, elicit "oohs" and "ahs," serve as a locus for both money-making and pleasure-making activities, instill a sense of pride in citizens who now tell visitors I'll show you downtown, but there really isn't much to see or do there.

I've talked to quite a few people about what they'd like to see at Salem's riverfront. Universally, they are bullish on the success of a restaurant, or nightspot, that overlooks the water and has an appealing atmosphere.

So I wonder how intensely Jason Tokarski sought a restaurateur who'd be willing to take a gamble on a riverfront location. This just seems to me a classic example of "build it, and they will come." Salem residents are hungry for something different to assuage their hunger and thirst.

I love to use the example of Apple when criticizing the tentativeness of Salem real estate developers.

Apple makes gobs of money. And Apple doesn't really give a shit about what the "market" wants. Apple makes a market. Apple produces a product that people had no idea they needed, but when they see it, they say to themselves "I have to buy it."

Like I said, I can understand why developers build stuff that they're confident will sell in today's real estate market. However, I also am confident that if a creative, gutsy, ballsy developer threw caution to the wind and built a really out there mixed use development (which would be par for the course in Portland), it would succeed.

Wildly. 

Sadly, it looks like we'll never know whether the initial vision of Salem's Boise Cascade redevelopment could have become a successful reality. Salem awaits a developer who dreams big and refuses to wake up.

(My previous posts about Salem's riverfront are here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Ryan budget shows Republican commitment to unreality

I've got to give the Republicans credit. 

Now, having written that warm-and-fuzzy sounding first line, I'm faced with figuring out what I should give them credit for. Hmmmm... I'm stumped. Is it the late night hour? Lack of caffeine? 

Perhaps. But much more likely is the fact that the only recent accomplishment of the not-so-Grand Old Party is its undying commitment to unreality. 

Republicans are really good at not comprehending what is real.

Faced with a clear consensus about human caused global warming among 97% of the world's leading climare scientists and obvious planetary effects... Republicans say, "not happening." Faced with equally convincing evidence that more guns and less gun regulations means much higher gun deaths in the U.S. than other industrialized nations... Republicans say, "not true."

Just as bizarrely, faced with a clear-cut election victory by Obama and other Democrats last November, after voters were exposed for an excruciatingly long time to social policy debates between Republican and Democratic positions, the G.O.P. faithful are sticking their heads in the sand and muttering, "Election? What election?"

Greg Sargent nailed the absurdity of this, fantasizing how things would look if the situation were reversed.

Imagine that Mitt Romney had decisively defeated Obama in the 2012 election on a platform of tax cuts for the rich and deep cuts to government as the only way to reduce the deficit, dramatically repudiating the President’s call for higher taxes on the wealthy, continued implementation of the biggest expansion of the safety net in 60 years, and more government spending to boost the economy.

Then imagine that Democrats in the Senate (the only part of government they controlled) responded to this by proposing to dramatically expand health care and stimulus spending and pay down the deficit only with 100 percent tax hikes — and not a single penny more in spending cuts — and on top of that, then suggested President Romney has failed to sincerely try to find common ground with them.

This is pretty much what Republicans did on the Sunday shows yesterday — in reverse. On Fox News Sunday, Paul Ryan confirmed that his budget will repeal Obamacare (even as he counts in his budget the $700 billion in Obamacare Medicare cuts that Republicans campaigned against in 2012). The Ryan budget will supposedly wipe out the deficit in 10 years. This likely will mean even deeper cuts than the ones in his previous budget, which represented the GOP’s fiscal agenda writ large and broadly speaking was rejected by voters last November.

Thankfully, President Obama and Democrat leaders in Congress have a much firmer grasp on reality. Voters rejected Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and the Ryan budget approach. That's a fact. Deal with it, G.O.P. People want a balanced approach to balancing the budget.

Not all spending cuts. Not all revenue increases. A balance. Ever sat on a see-saw? Republicans should try it some time. Equal weight on the ends makes for a good balance.

That's what Senate Democrats have proposed: a ten year budget plan that calls for almost exactly equal spending cuts and revenue increases. Sounds good to me. Reflects what voters cast their ballots for just a few months ago.

The plan, assembled by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, would raise nearly a $1 trillion in new revenue over a decade by eliminating tax loopholes and breaks that benefit wealthy taxpayers and corporations. It recommends either limiting the overall itemized deductions of the top 2 percent of taxpayers or eliminating individual loopholes like the favorable tax rates given to hedge-fund managers. Corporations would no longer be able to avoid taxation by hiding money overseas.

At the same time, this budget cuts an equal amount of spending, $975 billion, in a way that avoids the reckless damage to vital programs and to the poor in the budget favored by the House. Nearly a third of the reductions come from new efficiencies in Medicare and Medicaid, building on the reforms in the Affordable Care Act. The rest comes from defense cuts after American troops withdraw from Afghanistan, along with cuts to wasteful programs like agriculture supports.

Dana Milbank wrote a great piece that exposed the magical thinking of Paul Ryan and his fellow Republicans. They believe that by uttering some hocus-pocus bullshit political incantatations with no substance behind them will foot the American public into supporting their effort to conduct class warfare on behalf of the rich.

Here's some of what Milbank said:

Paul Ryan’s budget is an amazing and wondrous document.

Not only does it balance the budget in 10 years while reducing tax rates, it also does so without any pain or suffering — or even breaking a sweat. It achieves not just the longtime goals of policymakers — “a safety net strengthened . . . retirement secured . . . a nation protected” — but also brings about changes in human nature that have bedeviled civilization from the beginning of time. “This budget ends cronyism; eliminates waste, fraud and abuse,” Ryan’s plan promises.

“Now, how do we do this?” Ryan (R-Wis.), the House Budget Committee chairman, asked with a magician’s flourish as heunveiled his budget Tuesday morning.

Here’s how: The former Republican vice presidential candidate’s budget eliminates ___ loopholes in the tax code, cutting the ___ and the ____ deductions. It reduces spending on the ____ program by _____ and the _____ program by _____. Retirees would see ____, students would experience ____ and the poor would be _____.

There are so many blanks in Ryan’s budget that it could be a Mad Libs exercise. But this is not a game. It’s black-box budgeting — an expression of lofty aims, with binders full of magic asterisks in lieu of specific cuts to government benefits. If this were a fitness plan, Ryan, a former personal trainer, would be telling Americans that under his revolutionary program, they could lose 50 pounds in 10 weeks without dieting or working out.

U.S. conservatives are much more anti-science than liberals

False equivalency is the refuge of those who fail to understand the difference between 0 and 1. Meaning, there's a lot of different differentness between having nothing of something, and having a totality of something. 

One-tenth, for example, is a lot closer to zero than nine-tenths is. Yet this is just about how I see the anti-science biases of liberals and conservatives in the United States. 

Sure, liberals have some wacky notions. Many think vaccines cause disease and that genetically modified foods are poison from Monsanto. (There may be some truth in both propositions, but not much.)

However, when we compare the anti-science craziness of liberals and conservatives, the weight of irrationality falls much more on the right-wing side of the political see-saw. Which is why I heartily disliked a recent article in New Scientist magazine that argued for an equivalency between the two.

In the most recent New Scientist issue, I was pleased to find two letters to the editor that took the authors of the article to task.

From Matt Ball
Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell write that "vilifying an entire philosophy based on the actions of its radical ideologues would be unfair" (2 February, p. 24). They then claim that "progressivism stands as the most pressing problem for science."

They seem to be living in a fantasy world where the "lunatic fringe" of the left has real power. Are lefties stopping stem cell research? Denying students knowledge of the basis for all modern biology? Denying women medical services? Condemning us all to a much hotter, extreme future? Passing laws outlawing basic maths and science?

It is so easy to "hippie punch", rather than take on the institutionalized and mainstream anti-science attitude of conservatives in the US.
Tucson, Arizona, US 

From Anne Green
In the US, members of one political party deny basic physics (the effects of greenhouse gases), modern biology (evolution), geology (the age of the planet), astronomy (the age of the universe), physiology ("if it is a legitmate rape..."), sociology ("gays will destroy society!") and economics ("lower taxes mean more revenue").

This is a party whoe highest-ranking member on the House of Representatives Science Committee recently stated: "All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell."

What evidence do Berezow and Campbell submit to show that Democrats are more dangerous than the proudly anti-science Republicans? An attempt to put "green" utensils in the House cafeteria. And we wonder why people are so easily confused and manipulated, why so few can analyse arguments with reason and logic.
Tucson, Arizona, US 

Clackamas County commissioners don't understand meaning of "contract"

Well, a majority of Clackamas County voters decided they wanted a no-nothing Tea Party type, John Ludlow, to head up the Board of Commissioners.

They're getting what they deserve: a guy who doesn't understand the meaning of "contract" -- a simple word that most people grasp. 

An agreement between two or more parties, especially one that is written and enforceable by law. 

An agreement enforceable by law. That's what Clackamas County and Tri Met have in regards to an extension of light rail to Milwaukie.

But Ludlow has set the County on a collison course with a court case he is almost certain to lose.

TriMet filed a lawsuit today to force Clackamas County to follow through on its commitments to the Portland-Milwaukie light rail project.

The transportation agency says the county has delayed final project property acquisitions and $1.3 million in road and signal improvements, and that this could impede the project. TriMet claims that the county is breaking its contracts with TriMet by not letting construction of the line continue as previously agreed.

Way to go, TriMet.

Ludlow and his fellow anti-government, anti-alternative transportation, anti-train, anti-taxes commissioners deserve to have their bullshit put to a stop by the legal system.

Rail phobia is one thing. Failing to abide by a legal contract is a whole other thing.

It seems obvious that when Clackamas County signed a binding agreement with TriMet prior to the passage of an initiative that required voter approval of anything to do with rail in the county, that agreement had to be honored.

The smart approach would be to save the citizens money by admitting the obvious and not engaging in a costly legal battle with TriMet. However, Ludlow isn't smart. Devious, yes. Dishonorable, yes. But smart, no. 

Though he's only been in office a few months, Ludlow already is becoming a source of hilarity with his quasi-dictatorial Clackistan shenanigans. 

The IFC channel already has Portlandia. Maybe we should get TLC channel to create "Clackistan". The show would be centered around a county government in which the elected officials and employees do all sorts of whacky, corrupt stuff at taxpayer expense.

Where in the world could we find such a place, where the government has been allowed to become such a comedy of errors? Hmm...I know! Clackamas County. Cue the laugh track.

Except, this shouldn't be funny to county residents. Hopefully they'll remember the antics of the political jokers they voted for last November and not repeat that mistake again.  

The Oregonian editorial board is sounding an alarm about the trouble John Ludlow is causing in the county commission. When Ludlow loses the TriMet lawsuit, that alarm will be much louder.

Update: Here's a great comment from "edwardalbini" I found on the Oregonian story about the Trimet lawsuit:

Apparently the newly elected Clackamas County commissioners (and many of their constituents including several who are active in this forum) are unaware of the legal definition of the word "contract". That ignorance is on display in last year's Measure 3-401, which set the stage for this lawsuit. 
 
The likelihood is EXTREMELY high the contract will eventually be upheld. If the county commission is making a conscious decision to breach the contract and pay penalties for doing so, only to end up honoring the contract anyway, is that really in the best interest of Clackamas County taxpayers? 
 
Fortunately, Clackamas County will be able to use future I-205 toll income to offset penalties and legal fees. Last month, in a brilliant "spur-of-the-moment" move, County Chairman John Ludlow spearheaded a measure for the May 21st ballot to allow voters to decide whether to institute a toll on I-205 as a defensive measure to the Columbia River Crossing. So the County has that going for them. Wait... uh... Ludlow forgot that I-205 is a FEDERAL highway and did not consult with the Federal Highway Administration before floating the toll idea.  
 
Next, look for Ludlow and crew to push for a ballot measure allowing voters to decide upon whether or not to roll back the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956.

More gun regulations, fewer deaths. Study of states proves it.

I accept your apologies, gun advocates. In quite a few posts on this blog, I've been stating the obvious: controlling the availability of guns produces fewer gun deaths.

After all, guns kill people. People don't kill people.  (The number of bare-handed murders is hugely less than the number of murders by a gun.)

But I've gotten quite a few comments from defenders of unfettered gun availability who ignore research proving my point. Hopefully a new study will come closer to convincing them that while they're free to believe what they want to, they aren't free to make up their own facts.

Have a read: "States with more gun restrictions have fewer deaths, study says."

As Congress debates whether to toughen the nation’s gun laws, a study from Boston Children’s Hospital found that states with the highest number of gun laws have the lowest rates of gun deaths due to homicides and suicides.

The research, published online Wednesday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, analyzed gun laws in all 50 states as well as the total number of gun-related deaths in each state from 2007 through 2010. It found that fatality rates ranged from a high of 17.9 per 100,000 people in Louisiana — a state among those with the fewest gun laws — to a low of 2.9 per 100,000 in Hawaii, which ranks sixth for its number of gun restrictions.

Massachusetts, which the researchers said has the most gun restrictions, had a gun fatality rate of 3.4 per 100,000.

“Critics of gun laws have said that gun laws don’t work, but our research indicates the opposite,” said study leader Dr. Eric Fleegler, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Boston Children’s Hospital. “In states with the most laws, we found a dramatic decreased rate in firearm fatalities, though we can’t say for certain that these laws have led to fewer deaths.”

Cause and effect is difficult to prove when studying complicated real world social problems. Kudos to the researchers for not claiming more implications from the study than were claimable.

You can bet that if the NRA had conducted a study and found the opposite -- that fewer gun laws were correlated with fewer deaths -- they'd be shamelessly promoting the research as a solid basis for repealing gun regulations.

The online journal article describing this new research can be read here. Here's the conclusion:

In conclusion, we found an association between the legislative strength of a state's firearm laws—as measured by a higher number of laws—and a lower rate of firearm fatalities. The association was significant for firearm fatalities overall and for firearm suicide and firearm homicide deaths, individually. As our study could not determine a cause-and-effect relationship, further studies are necessary to define the nature of this association.

Absolutely. Do the research.

And let's also pass some nationwide gun control measures, such as universal background checks where the records are kept permanently -- just as they are currently for guns bought from licensed dealers.

Nothing is absolutely certain in life. Except death. It's horribly immoral and unethical to stand pat and shrug our societal shoulders while every year thousands upon thousands of people needlessly die from gun violence in these United States.

About 30,000 people a year are murdered by a gun, or commit suicide by using a gun. The study found a six-fold difference in deaths per 100,000 among the states. With the overall national rate about 10 deaths per 100,000, and the lowest state rate (Hawaii) being about 3 deaths per 100,000, arguably we could reduce gun deaths by two-thirds through stronger gun regulations. 

This isn't guaranteed. But if we do nothing, we'll get more of the same: the most lax gun culture of any industrialized country in the world, and by far the highest rate of gun deaths.

For progressives, defense cuts are positive side of sequester

On the whole it's stupid to make across-the-board spending cuts to much of the federal budget. That's what the sequester legislation does, which both parties and Obama agreed to. 

Stephen Colbert likened this to someone trying to lose weight by using a scalpel to slice 2% of his poundage off over his entire body. The image was appropriately gruesome. 

I don't like the sequester either, in large part because Republicans have come to like it. Anything that shrinks government, they're for. Even if the programs and services being cut are valuable, necessary, and desired by the citizenry.

But many progressives agree with the GOP on this: defense spending deserves to be cut by $500 billion over the next ten years. This is the good side of the sequester: half of it comes out of defense.

Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, wants the sequester to go fully into effect. 

"We should let it happen," Dean said of $1 trillion in domestic, defense and Medicare spending cuts set to be triggered on March 1. "I’m in favor of the sequester. It is tough on things that I care about a lot, but the fact of the matter is, you are not going to get another chance to cut the defense budget in the way that it needs to be cut."

Ezra Klein, another progressive, agrees. He laid out his reasoning in a convincing piece, "The case for the sequester's defense cuts."

Now, sequestration is a really stupid way to cut the defense budget. I’m not arguing that. But a $500 billion cut is not necessarily a stupid amount by which to cut the defense budget. And cutting $500 billion from the defense budget is not necessarily a stupid way to reduce the deficit.

Klein points out that even with the sequester, the defense budget will be down only 31% from the highs reached during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By comparison, defense cuts were considerably larger after the Korean War (43%), Vietnam War (33%), and the Cold War (36%). 

Defense is taking a bigger pecentage hit from the sequester than other programs, almost 10% overall. This is as it should be.

We spend way too much on defense, especially since there aren't any serious threats to the United States that demand ridiculous weapons systems like the absurdly expensive F-35 fighter jet -- which costs $135 million each, could cost $396 billion in total, and has been plagued with problems. 

Still, I'm hoping a smarter approach to federal spending can be found that will replace the sequester. But if Republicans stonewall by demanding all of the cuts come from domestic programs, Obama and the Democrats should say "Fine, then let's stick with what we have."

Because the sequester is halfway good: the $500 billion in defense cuts.

Just do it: read Steven Brill's TIME expose of medical costs

It took me two nights of bathtub reading to get through the 26,000 words of Steven Brill's masterful cover story in TIME magazine: "Why Medical Bills are Killing Us." It was time with TIME well spent.

Do it. If you haven't already. Read the story. You'll never look upon the health care system in the same way again. Most likely in this way:

If you aren't already convinced that hospitals (both non-profit and for-profit), drug companies, and medical device manufacturers aren't dedicated to screwing over the American public, Brill's expose will make you scream: You bastards! 

If you were already convinced, as I was, that scream will be just as loud: I knew they were bastards! 

Aaron Carroll, a physician who speaks the truth about our horribly inefficient and ineffective health care policies, correctly points out that little or nothing Brill wrote about is new news. Read his "You mean its the prices, stupid?"

So I finally got around to reading Steven Brill’s piece in Time this weekend. Yeah it took me a while, but man – why so long? I have a number of thoughts on  it, although I’ll be very disappointed in you long-time readers if you found much of it surprising.

First of all, IT’S THE PRICES, STUPID! Is this really news to anyone (each of those words is a different link, BTW)? Seriously? Not to beat a dead horse, but it’s one of the ways Switzerland keeps its costs under more control. As Sarah Kliff points out, other countries do this, too. Have you guys really not read or heard us talk about Maryland? Yes, it’s the prices. They are super, super high in the United States. Everything costs more here. Granted, the sensational nature of the piece carries far more weight, but I’m shocked at how many of my Twitter followers got the vapors after reading it.

The Sarah Kliff piece in the Washington Post referred to by Carroll provides a good overview of the TIME story in many fewer words. In fact, she does it in one sentence:

Steven Brill started his cover story in this week’s Time magazine with a simple health-policy question: “Why exactly are the bills so high?”

His article is essentially a 26,000-word answer, the longest story that the magazine has ever run by a single author. It’s worth reading in full, but if you’re looking for a quick summary, the article seemed to me to boil down to one sentence: The American health-care system does not use rate-setting.

We should. Medicare is the only aspect of our health care system which comes out looking really good in Brill's story. I can hardly wait to ditch Blue Cross/Blue Shield and jump into Medicare when I turn 65 this year.

There's no rhyme or reason to the charges you see on your hospital bill. Doctor bills maybe make a little more sense. But not a whole lot. Brill's many real life examples make clear that there is very little relation between what a patient is charged, and what the actual cost of the service is.

Medicare, though, carefully calculates what it actually costs to provide a medical service. Then it makes payments based on those costs. This isn't exactly rate setting. But it's a heck of lot better than what goes on outside of Medicare and Medicaid in the private insurance and no insurance sides of health care.

The people who get screwed the most are the ones who can least afford it: those who pay out of pocket. They're at the mercy of the Evil Chargemaster described in horrendous detail by brill. 

The chargemaster, I learned, is every hospital's internal price list. Decades ago it was a document the size of a phone book; now it's a massive computer file, thousands of items long, maintained by every hospital. 

...No hospital’s chargemaster prices are consistent with those of any other hospital, nor do they seem to be based on anything objective — like cost — that any hospital executive I spoke with was able to explain. “They were set in cement a long time ago and just keep going up almost automatically,” says one hospital chief financial officer with a shrug.

Health insurance companies get a discount from the chargemaster prices. My wife and I have noted this on our medical bills, even though they're not from a hospital. Even when we haven't met our deductible, we get a discounted price because we have Blue Cross insurance.

People who pay out of pocket because they lack insurance thus are the only ones who get billed the full chargemaster price. That's obscene. Especially when hospital, insurance, drug company, and other health care executives are making millions of dollars a year.

Our system is terribly messed up compared to how health care is provided in other countries. Brill makes that crystal clear.

Taken as a whole, these powerful institutions and the bills they churn out dominate the nation’s economy and put demands on taxpayers to a degree unequaled anywhere else on earth. In the U.S., people spend almost 20% of the gross domestic product on health care, compared with about half that in most developed countries. Yet in every measurable way, the results our health care system produces are no better and often worse than the outcomes in those countries.

According to one of a series of exhaustive studies done by the McKinsey & Co. consulting firm, we spend more on health care than the next 10 biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Australia. We may be shocked at the $60 billion price tag for cleaning up after Hurricane Sandy.

We spent almost that much last week on health care. We spend more every year on artificial knees and hips than what Hollywood collects at the box office. We spend two or three times that much on durable medical devices like canes and wheelchairs, in part because a heavily lobbied Congress forces Medicare to pay 25% to 75% more for this equipment than it would cost at Walmart.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 10 of the 20 occupations that will grow the fastest in the U.S. by 2020 are related to health care. America’s largest city may be commonly thought of as the world’s financial-services capital, but of New York’s 18 largest private employers, eight are hospitals and four are banks.

Employing all those people in the cause of curing the sick is, of course, not anything to be ashamed of. But the drag on our overall economy that comes with taxpayers, employers and consumers spending so much more than is spent in any other country for the same product is unsustainable. Health care is eating away at our economy and our treasury.

The health care industry seems to have the will and the means to keep it that way. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical and health-care-product industries, combined with organizations representing doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, health services and HMOs, have spent $5.36 billion since 1998 on lobbying in Washington.

That dwarfs the $1.53 billion spent by the defense and aerospace industries and the $1.3 billion spent by oil and gas interests over the same period. That’s right: the health-care-industrial complex spends more than three times what the military-industrial complex spends in Washington.

Brill's analysis re-convinced me of something I already was convinced of: any efforts by politicians of the Republican variety to reduce government health care spending by cutting benefits, or increasing premiums, makes no sense.

It isn't patients who are the problem. The problem is crazily irrational exorbitant charges for services people in other countries pay much less for. Medicare is administered in a highly efficient fashion, much more so than private insurance companies.

Even so, Medicare is constrained by the health care-industrial complex lobbyists mentioned by Brill. For example, Medicare should be allowed to negotiate down the cost of prescription drugs.

The most atrocious Republican idea is to make a bad situation worse by putting even more emphasis on an unfettered free market in health care. We already have the highest medical costs of any industrialized country, with lower than average health outcomes.

Regulation in the form of "Medicare For All" is the best way of bringing costs down and positive outcomes up. For some reason Brill doesn't go quite that far in his list of policy recommendations, but he should have.

Another way to get the gist of Brill's story is to watch a 13 minutes Wonkblog discussion between Ezra Klein and Sarah Kliff. I didn't watch the whole thing, but what I did see, I liked. 

David Withnell omits facts about protest at Dodge dealership

A few days ago I saw some guys holding a banner on the sidewalk in front of Salem's Withnell Dodge dealership on Commercial Street. Couldn't read the banner as I drove past. I figured it was some sort of advertising for the dealership.

Nope. It was a protest by the Pacific NW Regional Council of Carpenters. I learned this via a February 27 letter to the editor in the Statesman Journal from David Withnell.

On Jan. 23, 2013, I showed up for work to find three people in front of my Dodge dealership with a 50-foot banner stating, “Shame on Withnell Dodge — Hurts our community.” Not knowing what this was about, I called the number on the flier and asked.

Apparently the union had a labor dispute with a company that the Northwest Agricultural Show used to build their booths for their event in Portland. Our involvement was solely as an exhibitor in the show. I don’t know this union nor the company they are upset with.

The ag show was a four-day event at the end of January and, 40 days later, they are still out front of my dealership, every day, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. How is this action helping their cause?

They admit they don’t have an issue with me, yet their misleading banner makes it look as if I’m at fault for something.

So shame on the Pacific NW Regional Council of Carpenters (from Kent, Wash.) and shame on the people who think this type of protest is beneficial or right.

Curious about what the labor dispute was about, and somewhat skeptical about Withnell's claim that his dealership was in the dark about it, I fired up Google and did some digging in cyberspace.

First, a quick look at the Council of Carpenters' Facebook page shows that the union calls "Shame On..." fairly frequently. I counted seven shame photos, including the Dodge dealership's (above). So Withnell Dodge shouldn't feel like it's being singled out. 

But shame for what?

Searching for information on what the protest was all about led me to Bill Post's blog, where he'd written "Union Thugs Picket Car Dealer in Salem." Thugs? The guys I saw on the sidewalk were just calmly standing there, holding a banner. 

A letter from the Council of Carpenters included with the post made them sound even less thuggish. The letter, dated January 16, 2013, was addressed to the Northwest Agricultural Show -- where Withnell Dodge was an exhibitor.

Withnell Dodge was cc'd along with other apparent exhibitors, so almost certainly the dealership was sent a copy of the letter. Thus when David Withnell says that he had no idea on January 23 what the protest was about, and that he had never heard of the Council of Carpenters, seemingly either he hadn't read the letter, someone at Withnell Dodge had failed to tell him about it, or the post office took more than a week to deliver mail from Kent, Washington to Salem (unlikely). 

Regardless, by February 27, when his letter to the editor was published, Withnell certainly should have been aware of what the Council of Carpenters had told the Northwest Agricultural Show and the ten cc'd exhibitors.

Here's the last two paragraphs of the letter.

I found the language courteous, albeit strong and demanding. The Council of Carpenters makes it clear that anyone associated with the Show and its claimed payment of substandard wages through a contractor is at risk of a "peaceful and lawful display of banners and distribution of handbills."

Given that Withnell Dodge was an exhibitor at the Northwest Agricultural Show, and was cc'd on the letter sent by certified mail to the director of the Show, it sure seems that David Withnell isn't justified in claiming that the union doesn't have an issue with him.

Pretty clearly, they do. Whether their gripe is justified... that's another question.

I can understand how someone could sympathize either with the Council of Carpenters, or with Withnell Dodge. My point is just that the Carpenters union contacted Withnell Dodge before the protest began and told the dealership why it might be targeted for a banner display.

Which is what has happened. The union followed through on what it said it might do. Withnell Dodge followed through on participating in the Northwest Agricultural Show. Each organization is doing what seems right to it.

No problems there.

However, what bothers me about David Withnell's letter to the editor is that he makes it sound like the protest at his dealership was a complete surprise to him, and that he has no idea why the Council of Carpenters is upset with Withnell Dodge. 

Free speech, including protesting peacefully and lawfully, is part of the American way.

Withnell Dodge should respect that right rather than wrongly portraying the Council of Carpenters as singling out the dealership for a protest without any reason.

Clackamas County's strange rail phobia

Don't know if this condition is an official psychiatric diagnosis, but lots of people in Clackamas County (Oregon) sure seem to have it: an irrational fear of trains. 

Secondary related symptom: an irrational fear of highway transportation congestion caused in part by a lack of trains.

Such is the strangeness of thought disorders. This one just happens to have manifested in a majority of those voting in recent Clackamas County elections, along with a majority of county commissioners. 

Watching the malady manifest from Salem, a southward rail-lacking point where we'd love to have light rail to Portland and high speed rail to anywhere, the craziness appears decidedly misplaced.

Signs of the illness showed up first in 2011 when Clackamas County voters rejected paying $5 a year in increased auto registration fees to help replace the Sellwood Bridge. The fact that 70% of trips across the bridge orginated or ended in their county didn't sway the highway transportation-fearing citizenry.

Next, in 2012 Clackamas County voters passed an initiative requiring countywide voter approval before officials can spend money to finance, design, construct or operate any rail lines in the county.

This included light rail linking the county to the Portland area's acclaimed system, high speed rail, and even improvements to freight lines. Reasons for this rail-phobia were never made clear, but mental problems rarely have reasonable causes.

From my reading of news stories on the subject, many residents seemed to fear an influx of -- gasp! -- Portlanders. Hipsters. Gangsta types. Feminists. Skateboarders. Vegans. Not sure who exactly was visualized as debarking in Clackamas County and wreaking... something or other.

They were scary though. At least in the imagination of many county voters.

Now, in 2013, the craziness continues.

The county commissioners decided to put two light rail measures on the May ballot, even though there is no need for them. One measure involves an issue that can't be voted on by the entire county and the other involves a binding contract for light rail to Portland already signed, sealed, and decided upon.

The board of commissioners also wants to ask voters what they think of tolling I-205, which runs through Clackamas County, to dissuade drivers from using the freeway in case a new I-5 bridge is built over the Columbia.

Wow. County insanity is reaching new levels.

Clackamas County is afraid of light rail, which is an alternative to automotive travel. But voters didn't want to pay for a replacement Sellwood Bridge even though most of the users of the bridge drive cars to and from the county.

County leaders also are afraid of automotive travel on I-205, yet are equally afraid of alternatives to automotive travel like light rail. So it looks like they'd like people in Clackamas County, including businesses operating there, to either stay put or travel as slowly as possible through as much congestion as possible.

Not exactly a great economic development plan. But hey, I wouldn't expect phobias to result in sensible social policies.

Kaufmann crushes Marquis in KGW marijuana debate

Sure, I'm biased. I want marijuana to be legalized in Oregon.

This made good sense before Washington, our neighbor to the north, made pot legal last November. Now, it makes even more sense -- since soon a good share of Oregon's population will be within an hour's driving time of state-sponsored marijuana stores.

Recently KGW TV held a "Straight Talk" debate on marijuana legalization between Roy Kaufmann, spokesman for the unsuccessful Measure 80 campaign that would have made pot legal here, and Josh Marquis, Clatsop County district attorney.

I liked how both Kaufmann and Marquis were respectful, well-spoken, and generally on target with their responses to moderator Laural Porter's questions. But if you watch the 25 minute debate (with a brief ad at the start), I bet you'll agree with me that Kaufmann had the stronger arguments.

Marquis' major less-than-persuasive argument was that use of marijuana in Oregon currently is (1) effectively decriminalized for possession of less than an ounce and (2) is so common, it's obvious that hardly anyone is being prevented from smoking pot under our current laws.

Pretty lame reasons for keeping the status quo.

Kaufmann pointed out that decriminalization (making possession of small amounts a misdemeanor) still results in some people losing their drivers license and incurring other penalties for using a substance that is much less harmful than alcohol. 

He said that he's asked law enforcement personnel if they've ever heard of someone smoking pot engaging in domestic violence, getting in a bar fight, or otherwise being spurred into violent behavior by the "demon weed."

The response: nope. Even Marquis admitted that marijuana users are prone to lying on the couch and raiding the refigerator rather than engaging in antisocial misdeeds. 

Why, then, asked Kaufmann repeatedly, should marijuana be illegal when society would be better off if people substituted pot for alcohol when they want to imbibe a consciousness-altering drug?

Marquis' weak response was that marijuana is still banned under federal law. (It's looking though, like the Obama administration is going to let the Washington and Colorado legalization experiments move forward.)

I appreciated Marquis' live-and-let-live attitude toward marijuana use, but thought this argued more for legalization than the status quo. If Oregonians are doing fine with quasi-open, widespread marijuana use, why not make it legal?

Kaufmann noted that a regulated system would bring revenues into state coffers, reduce the power of drug cartels, and probably make pot less easy for minors to obtain. 

Just about the only time I disagreed with Kaufmann, a skilled public relations guy, was when he said that marijuana legalization would be back on the ballot in 2016. Seems to me that 2014 should be the year when Oregonians legalize both same-sex marriage and pot.

Whew! No reason to worry about Rubio being GOP savior.

Last night I watched Marco Rubio's Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address with some trepidation. After all, TIME magazine has just annointed him on its cover as "The Republican Savior." 

And I'm a Democrat. I don't want the GOP to be saved. I want it to continue on down its road to ruin.

Thankfully, proving that my prayers to Tao, Buddha-nature, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster paid off, Rubio gave a thoroughly mundane speech which, in my oh-so-reasonable opinion, wouldn't sway many (if any) Dem-voters to the Republican side.

I tried to picture independently minded swing voters watching Rubio. I did my best to forget what I knew about him, and just focus on how he came across in his big TV moment.

Not well.

And I'm not talking about his distracting hand motions, dry lips, and weird mid-speech drinking of water from a plastic container (didn't they have a classier looking glass handy?) If anything, those things made Rubio look appealingly human.

No, what struck me was how the GOP continues to fail to understand how out of touch the party is with a majority of Americans. 

The country has moved on. The Republican Party hasn't.

It's acting like a guy still trying to sell VHS tapes when almost everybody watches movies on DVD or via online streaming. Dude, your pitch was fine for the 1980s, but not now.

After the financial industry meltdown, most people don't believe that big corporations are innocents, while big government is the evildoer. Neither do most people believe that traditional marriage is threatened by giving same-sex couples the right to marry. And other rights.

Anti-science global warming denying doesn't cut it any more, not after such clear signs as extreme heat/drought events, record rains, unusually powerful storms, disappearing Arctic ice, and such. Blathering about "broken borders" is no longer persuasive when illegal immigration is at a record low.

The stock market is nearing its highest level ever, so obviously the business community isn't fearful of a socialist Obama second term. Marijuana has been legalized in two states; medical marijuana use is steadily spreading; calling for fighting harder on the "war on drugs" is increasingly laughable. 

Women aren't willing to roll back the clock and be told what they can and can't do. Forced vaginal ultrasounds, denial of contraceptive coverage, and refusal to support legislation aimed at stopping violence against women isn't going to win female votes for the GOP.

Yet the Rubio I watched last night was clueless about all this.

He sounded almost exactly like Mitt Romney. Except less presidential. If Rubio is the great 2016 Republican hope, I can hear Democratic strategists saying "Bring him on!" I was prepared to see a guy who could reach out to women, minorities, young people, libertarian-minded independents.

But, nope. I saw an old white guy mentality in a youngish brown guy body. Slightly more appealing on the outside; same right-wing crap on the inside.

Gun nut or mass shooter? Sure look the same.

Here's a great "comic" by Jen Sorensen that would be funnier if it wasn't so disturbingly true.

l've been thinking in much the same way about what would happen if the NRA's wet dream became reality, and the United States was filled with people carrying military-style assault rifles and other guns openly around in public.

That'd be great for mass shooters. Blend right in.

Start shooting in a mall, kill a few people, then run around a corner with your rifle over your shoulder and start yelling, "Oh, my God! There's a shooter back there! Take cover. I'm going to move on and keep warning other people."

When everybody is carrying a gun, there will be no way to tell the "good guys" and "bad guys" apart. Until it is too late. Well, unless would-be mass murderers wear t-shirts like the one shown in the comic.

(But would they tell the truth and check "evil" if they actually are evil?)

Oregon should vote on gay marriage AND legal pot in 2014

Let's do it, Oregonians! Catch up to Washington state on "living free." Last year Washington affirmed the legality of gay marriage and legalized marijuana in a groundbreaking election. 

While Oregon weenied out on legalizing pot. So now our neighbor state to the north will reap the tax revenues from Oregonians journeying across the border to score some legal weed. 

Today I was excited to learn that Basic Rights Oregon has decided to put a measure on the 2014 ballot that would legalize same-sex marriage. 

Basic Rights Oregon has been laying the groundwork for a statewide vote on the issue since 2009. In 2011, however, the group decided not to go to the ballot in 2012, with Frazzini saying at the time that there wasn’t enough consensus on the issue to have a “reasonable expectation of success.”

But with last year’s landmark victories and a continued shift in the polls toward more public acceptance of gay marriage, Basic Rights officials concluded that they could find fertile ground in 2014.

 The most recent public survey on the issue, by Public Policy Polling in December, found that 54 percent of Oregon voters believed same-sex marriage should be legal, while 40 percent were opposed.

The campaign's web site, Oregon United for Marriage, already is up and running. Excellent.

The time is ripe for marriage equality, given the large shift in both public opinion and governmental policies toward gay marriage in recent years.

Likewise, the tide has turned for marijuana legalization, with voters in Colorado and Washington approving legal pot.

An architect of the successful Colorado effort, Steve Fox, came to Oregon and advised marijuana advocates to wait until 2016 to put another legalization initiative on the ballot. 

Getting a legalization measure on the 2016 ballot – a presidential election year –would translate into greater voter support than if activists tried in 2014.

"What we have seen since 2000 is that if you do a ballot initiative related to marijuana on a presidential election year ballot as opposed to a mid-term election, the difference is stark," he said.

Fox said the extra two years gives voters the chance to see how legalization has worked in Colorado and Washington.

But his advice to wait another three years for another legalization initiative was a tough sell for some Oregon activists. They cite Oregon's proximity to Washington and the relatively narrow defeat of Measure 80, Oregon's legalization ballot measure, as reasons for pursuing an initiative sooner.

I agree with the activists.

Even more so now that a measure to legalize same-sex marriage almost certainly will be on the Oregon ballot in 2014. This will raise the visibility of the midterm election to nearly a presidential-year level.

I don't see how waiting to vote on marijuana legalization until 2016, when conservatives will be fired up to recapture the White House after eight years of Obama, makes sense. A lot of open-minded Oregonians are going to be eager to vote for same-sex marriage in 2014.

Might as well give them the opportunity to vote for legal pot on the same ballot. 

But those who crafted the 2012 Oregon initiative need to be replaced. I thank them for their effort and enthusiasm. However, the initiative was poorly thought-out, and the campaign to pass it was a disaster. Even so, the vote was close. 

With competent people in charge, there's a very good chance Oregon could legalize both marijuana and gay marriage next year.

Unfunny humor about gun control

Yesterday a bunch of people brought guns to the Oregon capitol building. They paraded outside showing off their rifles, handguns, shotguns, and other pseudo-macho paraphenalia.

Some even brought them inside, since Oregon is one of the few states that allow someone with a concealed handgun permit to carry around a military-style assault rifle in the halls of a Capitol. 

Now, news of this sort of event should stimulate a reasonable question: "Who the heck would be so crazy as to carry guns around in public like that for no good reason?"

After all, if I was a tourist visiting a state capitol, started to walk in, and saw a crowd brandishing weapons, I'd think What the #$@! are these fools up to? 

Reading newspaper reports of yesterday''s anti-gun control rally, I didn't get an answer to that query. There seemed to be no point to the gathering other to give some gun owners an opportunity to show off their toys in public.

What gets me, every time I see black-clad guys and gals strutting around with their weapons, is how little they have to be proud about. It takes zero courage and zero skill to own a gun. All you need is a VISA card. Shooting defenseless animals from long range, or defenseless targets, earns zero "guts points." 

I respect people who take risks. For twenty years or so I've been active in various forms of martial arts. People who fight other people skilled in fighting, even in a controlled situation, deserve a big thumbs-up for having the guts to risk getting hurt in the course of developing their skills.

Ditto for combat soldiers who use their guns to fight guys who also have guns. But walking around the Oregon Capitol with an AR-15... that's ridiculously lame. 

The whole "look at me with my big guns!" thing would be comical if it wasn't so unfunny. Doonesbury nailed the dark humor of this country's failure to protect our citizens from guns in a February 3 strip.

Several letters to the editor in today's Oregonian mentioned the unfunny comic. Here's one:

The Feb. 3 Doonesbury comic expressed my thoughts far more precisely than I could have written.

To quote: "What are we like as a people? ... Nine years ago we were attacked. 3,000 people died. In response, we started two long, bloody wars and built a vast homeland security apparatus -- all at a cost of trillions. ... During those same nine years, 270,000 Americans were killed by gunfire at home. Our response? We weakened gun laws."

I grew up in eastern Oregon and learned to use a gun for hunting game or for killing predators. A real sportsman/woman does not use a semi-automatic weapon.

I do not believe the majority of Americans, nor Oregonians, believe we need semi-automatic weapons, a gun on every corner or on every person walking down the street, and certainly not in our schools.

Our children are far too precious to grow up in that kind of gun culture.

ROBERTA HUNTER PARSONS-WACHHOLZ 
Northwest Portland

Nicely said, Roberta. You make good sense. Way more than a speaker at the We Want More Killings rally at the capitol made. The Salem Statesman Journal reported:

Republican lawmakers who spoke at the rally Friday said the Constitution is under attack and that they would fight for the Second Amendment rights of Oregonians.

Rep. Tim Freeman, R-Roseburg, is drafting legislation to be introduced next week called the “Second Amendment Preservation Act.” Freeman’s office would not provide any details about the bill Friday, but a speaker during the rally told participants it would make it illegal to enforce any new federal gun control measures that infringed upon Second Amendment rights.

Wow. More unfunny humor.

These supposed defenders of the Constitution have no idea how the Constitution works. Instead of marching around with their guns, they should spend more time learning about what makes our country great -- as ably designed by our founding fathers.

Ever heard of the Supreme Court, Rep. Freeman and unnamed gun rally speaker? This is who gets to ultimately decide what is constitutional and what isn't. Other courts make that determination before a case gets to the Supreme Court.

You can't pass a law that defines what the Second Amendment says, or doesn't say. The Supreme Court gets to do that saying. 

Like I said, this sort of ignorance would be comical if it wasn't so unfunny. People who are clueless about the Constitution are pretending that they're the only ones standing between us and tyranny. That's hilarious. 

Except, it isn't funny.

Oregon HOA's lose out on liens after foreclosure (probably)

I'm the secretary of our planned community's homeowners association (HOA). Our HOA has had to file liens on property owners who fail to pay their dues two years in a row.

The dues are only $185 a year. Payment plans are allowed. Volunteers do a lot of the work needed to maintain the common property (we also hire a contractor for mowing, spraying, bark mulching, and such). When dues aren't paid by some of our 90 property owners, the other owners have to make up the lost money.

Being the secretary, I have the not-so-fun duty of filing the liens with Marion County. I don't like doing this, especially if the person/people behind in their dues are having a tough time financially.

But I know that our HOA needs to be sure that even if dues aren't paid while someone is living here, when they sell their property the lien will have to be honored. Meaning, the HOA will finally get the unpaid dues.

I was wrong about being sure. Well, probably I was wrong.

We're still trying to figure out the legal ins and outs of what happens to a HOA lien in Oregon when a property goes into foreclosure. Currently it sure looks like HOA's get screwed (a non-legal but apt term) if a bank forecloses on a property that has a lien for unpaid dues on it.

I discovered this late last year after I got a phone call from a title company that would go nameless if I didn't call it AmeriTitle. A woman wanted to know what the annual HOA dues were, saying that the property was up for sale after being foreclosed on by a bank that also would go nameless if I didn't call it Wells Fargo.

I told her, adding "Of course, there is a lien on the property for unpaid dues, which I assume will be paid." That simple comment led to a series of complex back-and-forth exchanges between me, our HOA treasurer, AmeriTitle, and Wells Fargo.

In the end, we got stiffed (another non-legal but apt term). After several fruitless attempts to learn what the legal basis was for not honoring the HOA lien, I got a response from Amerititle that said:

Per Oregon Statute 94.709 ‘Whenever a homeowners association levies any assessment against a lot, the association shall have a lien upon the individual lot for any unpaid assessments…The lien is prior to a homestead exemption and all other liens or encumbrances upon the lot except:…(b) A first mortgage or trust deed of record.’ 

Per Oregon Statute 94.723 Common expenses; liability of first mortgagee, once a lot in a planned community is foreclosed upon the ‘mortgagee and subsequent purchaser shall not be liable for any of the common expenses chargeable to the lot which became due before the mortgagee or purchaser acquired title to the lot.  The unpaid expenses shall become a common expense of all lot owners including the mortgagee or purchaser.’. 

Per Oregon Statute 94.712 ‘An owner shall be personally liable for all assessments imposed on the owner or assessed against the owner’s lot by the homeowners association.’  Accordingly, the servicer on this property, Wells Fargo, paid the past due amounts owing against the lot according to the state statute, which is from the foreclosure sales date forward.  

So we got paid for the few months of unpaid dues that accrued between the time Wells Fargo foreclosed on the property. But not for the several years of unpaid dues prior to that date. Seems unfair to me. 

Our HOA lost out on about $300. However, another foreclosed property in our development owes considerably more. Those dues go to pay for maintenance of the common property, an asset of our community which increases considerably the value of homes and bare lots.

Sixteen states reportedly give HOA liens a "superlien" status, treating them as akin to property taxes: a bill that has to be paid by whoever forecloses on a property. I agree with this:

"The argument that HOAs should be senior to everything is like property taxes — they are part of preserving the collective value of the neighborhood," says Goodman, who represents servicers, HOAs and investors in distressed properties.

Confusing the issue, my Googling revealed quite a few references to Oregon being a superlien state. However, when I checked out the Oregon Statutes cited in the AmeriTitle letter (ORS 94.709, 94.723, 94.712), it sure seems like HOA liens get wiped out in a foreclosure.

Again, unfairly.

Wells Fargo is making plenty of money, along with other banks -- $4.9 billion in the third quarter of 2012. Billion. But they refused to pay our HOA $300 for dues that went toward increasing the value of the home and lot they foreclosed on, and recently sold. 

Our HOA board of directors will have to decide what to do in the future, if it turns out that our liens for unpaid dues indeed are wiped out in a foreclosure. We could go after the previous owner who failed to pay the dues. 

Collection Agency? Small Claims Court? Maybe.Since they refused to pay their dues while they lived here, almost surely a polite letter asking for the money is going to have even less effect after they've moved on following the foreclosure. 

It's a tough situation.

I can (sort of) understand why a bank or other mortage holder doesn't feel like they're responsible for dues incurred by the owner of the property being foreclosed on. However, the bank is reaping the benefits of our HOA's maintenance work on the common assets of our development. 

Oregon law may be on the banks' side. Right and wrong, though, often is different from lawful and unlawful. 

If anyone reading this knows more about the subject of HOA liens and foreclosures than I do, a highly distinct possibility, please leave a comment and enlighten me. Or email me (link in the sidebar). 

Oregonian wastes paper on global warming denier Gordon Fulks

Oregon's largest newspaper, the Oregonian, is not-so-slowly sinking into irrelevancy. That's my considered opinion, at least.

As noted in a recent post about a global warming story that downplayed scientific fact and played up a local meteorologist's unscientific denial of climate change, I've noted a distinct right-wing tilting in both the news and editorial sections during the past few years.

After reading an absurd January 19 op-ed by Gordon Fulks, "The Changing Climate of Climate Change," that was prominently displayed by Oregonian editors, I'm even more convinced that the newspaper has joined the Republican war on science.

It pains me to copy and paste even one word of Fulks' bullshit, but I'll force myself.

The evidence causing great grief is the refusal of the global temperature to increase for the past 15 years. It sloshes back and forth as one would expect on a planet with vast oceans and atmosphere that are never in equilibrium, but does not warm as some claimed it would with slowly increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Consequently, cracks are developing in the scientific facade supporting the dogma.

Reading the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is much like reading Pravda during the Cold War: You do not look for beliefs, but for hints of change. In a recent paper (not peer-reviewed), newly elected members touted their belief that they had found the "fingerprint" of greenhouse gases. 

Likely the Oregonian will start publishing op-ed screeds denying evolution and the big bang.

Why not?

Basically there's as much scientific evidence supporting human-caused global warming as there is for how life came to be as it on our planet, and how the universe came into being. Anyone who peruses the Climate Progress posts would know this.

For example: 

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) has finally published its findings on the cause of recent global warming. This Koch-funded reanalysis of millions of temperature observations from around the world, “A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011,” concludes:

… solar forcing does not appear to contribute to the observed global warming of the past 250 years; the entire change can be modeled by a sum of volcanism and a single anthropogenic [human-made] proxy.

...Muller further explained:

Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming.

The black line, with 95% confidence intervals on either side, shows the observed global temperature (more accurately measured since the early 1800s). The red line comes from a mathematical climate change model using only volcanic activity and human-caused carbon dioxide emissions.

Bingo. The two lines coincide closely, showing that Gordon Fulks is wrong, wrong, wrong. 

So the Oregonian wasted a lot of paper and ink on an op-ed that contained not even a scrap of valid opinionating, because Fulks denies a core fact: the Earth is rapidly warming, and human activity is the cause.

The editorial board should be embarassed.

There's plenty of room for different opinions about how the United States should deal with global warming, including how actively governments should act to reduce carbon emissions, versus leaving this to voluntary efforts.

But giving major op-ed "air" time to someone who is horribly ignorant about basic scientific facts, that should be a journalistic no-no. Several letters to the editor that were published a few days later (kudos to the Oregonian for that) showed how scientifically off-base Fulks is.

Here's one of the letters:

As a climate scientist who actively works and publishes in this field, I know what most of my colleagues also know. Temperatures and sea levels are rising, glaciers and sea ice are melting, and man-made greenhouse gases are to blame.

Gordon Fulks, however, in his Jan. 20 column ("The changing climate of climate change"), disagrees. Can he be right? Let's examine his arguments.

Fulks claims that global temperatures have not risen during the past 15 years. This is not true. Most heat trapped by carbon dioxide and other gases added to the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans, as clearly seen in measurements available at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website. Could the warming observed during the past 100 years be from heat that "sloshes back and forth" between the oceans and the atmosphere, as Fulks claims, or changes in the sun? No.

Even former climate skeptic Richard Muller, who has recently re-examined the surface temperature measurements, comes to the same conclusions as other climate scientists before him: Humans are the main cause.

Fulks flunks climate science. He cherry-picks information that supports his conclusion and ignores the rest. That's not science. Could it be that Fulks is right and a new ice age is imminent and all the academies of sciences that predict further warming are wrong? Of course.

But it is similarly unlikely that smoking is healthy and all medical associations are conspiring to fool you with their "radical" views on tobacco.

ANDREAS SCHMITTNER 
Corvallis  
Schmittner is an associate professor in Oregon State University's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. 

Obama's gun control plan supported by 52% of Americans

When it comes to gun control, the NRA likes to claim that it represents the American public. Not true. Obama does.

A national survey conducted January 17-20 among 1,006 adults found that 52% feel that Obama's are about right (39%) or do not go far enough (13%). 

By contrast, only 31% say Obama's proposals go too far. (No opinion: 17%)

Clearly Obama isn't a radical when it comes to gun control. He's got a majority of the country on his side. Hopefully this majority won't remain silent when it comes time for Congress to vote on requiring background checks for all gun purchasers, and other eminently sensible ideas.

Obama gets serious about climate change. Finally.

Yes. Yes. Yes. 

I could hear my brain screaming those words when I came across President Obama's strong statement about global warming in his second inauguation address.

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.

Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But American cannot resist this transition. We must lead it.

We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries. We must claim its promise. That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure, our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snow capped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

Or maybe my psyche was picking up similar sentiments from countless environmentalists who have been waiting for Obama to get serious about the most serious threat faced by humanity. Including a relieved, but still somewhat skeptical, Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm.

We will soon see if these words have any meaning whatsoever — since approving the Keystone XL pipeline would utterly vitiate them.

True. As would approval of exporting coal from mines in Wyoming and Montana through ports in Oregon and Washington. 

Many people here in the Pacific Northwest are concerned about the health effects of giant coal trains spewing coal dust across the countryside. However, a greater concern is how burning all that coal would affect global warming. 

An article in the October 13, 2012 New Scientist, "The Next Climate War," conveyed the uncomfortable facts.

PLANS for mega exports of US coal are poised to become the next flashpoint in the battle over climate change. The industry wants to massively increase shipments of coal to China and other energy-hungry Asian nations. Such a move would undo the environmental benefits of weaning US power plants off the carbon-rich fuel and lock developing countries into decades of dirty power.

So far, protests about the proposed exports have mostly been local affairs, led by those living along the railroads that will transport the coal from mines in Wyoming and Montana to planned ports on the Pacific coast. There's been nothing like the national controversy surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline - the plan to pump oil from Canada's tar sands to refineries in Texas. Yet according to New Scientist's analysis of calculations by carbon emissions specialists, the consequences for the global climate of allowing the coal exports could exceed those of completing the oil pipeline.

...According to New Scientist's calculations, based on emissions figures for Powder River Basin coal estimated by the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh, burning the exported coal, plus its extraction and transport by rail and ship, could cause annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 194 million tonnes of carbon dioxide if just the first three ports are built. That rises to as much as 266 million tonnes if all five come online.

To put these numbers in context, New Scientist asked Adam Brandt of Stanford University in California, who specialises in estimating greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel sources, to produce similar figures for Keystone XL. If the pipeline flows at its maximum capacity, he calculates that total annual greenhouse emissions resulting from the project, again including those due to extraction and transport of the fuel as well as its final use, would equate to 212 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

If the ports aren't built, much of the Powder River Basin coal would probably remain in the ground for the foreseeable future.

Stop the XL pipeline. Stop coal exports.

That's what the United States needs to do for future generations. And for ourselves. I hope President Obama puts his actions where his inaugural mouth was yesterday.

NRA disparages Secret Service protection for Obama's daughters

Despicable. Shameful. Outrageous. 

Until today I didn't think NRA executives could surprise me by acting more callous, tone-deaf, disrespectful, and unpatriotic than they've demonstrated in the past.

But now the NRA has put out a video insulting Obama and his daughters for using the Secret Service protection that has been uncontroversial in the past -- until the NRA decided that the best way to honor the deaths of twenty children at Sandy Hook Elementary School killed by an assault rifle is to pick on Sasha and Malia. 

"Has the NRA lost it entirely?" asks Salon. Answer: absolutely.

It's fair game to target the president's daughters, says a gun lobby leader. Responsible gun owners should tear up their membership cards in the NRA and other like-organizations. Your dues are paying for crap like this video.

 

At the moment, the video has many more thumbs-down dislikes than thumbs-up likes. Excellent.

The NRA is its own worst enemy, because it is opposed to any and all efforts that would bring gun violence in this country down to levels in Canada, Australia, England, Germany, and other nations with cultures similar to ours, but with much stronger gun regulations.

One of the executive orders President Obama announced today would restore federal funding for research into the causes of gun violence. The NRA squashed this sort of research back in 1996, demonstrating how fearful it is of the truth.

If more guns are so great at protecting people, why is it that people are much more likely to die from gun violence (murder or suicide) if there is a gun in the home? The NRA is afraid Americans will learn the facts about guns.

Obama has put us on the path toward becoming a genuine culture of life by reducing the thousands of needless gun deaths that occur in this country every year because of lax regulation. Hopefully Congress will follow his lead.

Republicans should read an op-ed by John Howard, former center-right prime minister of Australia: "I Went After Guns. Obama Can, Too." He oversaw the implementation of gun laws that banned assault weapons (bought them back, even) and instituted other regulations that worked.

In the end, we won the battle to change gun laws because there was majority support across Australia for banning certain weapons. And today, there is a wide consensus that our 1996 reforms not only reduced the gun-related homicide rate, but also the suicide rate. The Australian Institute of Criminology found that gun-related murders and suicides fell sharply after 1996.

The American Journal of Law and Economics found that our gun buyback scheme cut firearm suicides by 74 percent. In the 18 years before the 1996 reforms, Australia suffered 13 gun massacres — each with more than four victims — causing a total of 102 deaths. There has not been a single massacre in that category since 1996.

Few Australians would deny that their country is safer today as a consequence of gun control.

 

Oregonian story downplays global warming science

Yesterday I emailed a reporter for the Portland Oregonian that writing a story about global warming and including a mention about how some are skeptical the planet is getting hotter is akin to ending a story about a fossil discovery with "but some scientists doubt evolution is real."

That would be absurd. Evolution is a scientific truth. So is global warming. There's no doubt among the vast majority of reputable researchers in either field about these facts. 

So it bothered me when the reporter, Scott Learn, tossed in this sentence near the end of a story about how a national assessment shows the Pacific Northwest will be adversely affected by global warming.

Global warming skeptics note that temperatures in the nation and in the Northwest have remained fairly flat since 1998, a hot year, despite increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Well, creationist crazies also doubt that transitional fossils exist, but they do.

Global warming crazies are equally deluded when they seize on some irrelevant aspect of the vast corpus of scientific evidence supporting human-caused climate change and claim this proves their otherwise unprovable point.

In my email I told Learn:

There simply is no place for "balanced" reporting in this area. As a reporter, you aren't reporting the truth if you imply that there is some scientific debate over the reality of global warming. 

l appreciated the reporter's prompt reply, where he acknowledged that my point about the limitations of short-term data is a good one. For sure.

That's why I can't understand why Learn mentioned the 1998-2012 time span at all, especially since this is the new battleline global warming skeptics have retreated to in their fight against the facts -- which keep on winning.

Last month Phil Slait, the Bad Astronomy blogger, wrote a great piece for Slate: "Doubling Down on Climate Change Denial." It starts off with:

Oh, those wacky professional climate change deniers! Once again, they’ve banded together a passel of people, 90 percent of whom aren’t even climatologists, and had them sign a nearly fact-free opinion piece in the Financial Post, claiming global warming isn’t real. It’s an astonishing example of nonsense so ridiculous I would run out of synonyms for “bilge” before adequately describing it.

The Op-Ed is directed to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who has recently, and thankfully, been vocal about the looming environmental catastrophe of global warming. The deniers’ letter takes him to task for this, but doesn’t come within a glancing blow of reality.

The letter itself is based on a single claim. So let’s be clear: If that claim is wrong, so is the rest of the letter.

Guess what? That claim is wrong. So blatantly wrong, in fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone could write it with a straight face. It says:

“The U.K. Met Office recently released data showing that there has been no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years.”

This is simply, completely, and utterly false.

Let's absorb that scientific saying again: "simply, completely, and utterly false." Yet that falsehood was repeated in the Oregonian's story about how global warming will affect the Northwest. It shouldn't have been.

Here's how the United Kingdom's official climate researchers responded to the false claim of no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years.

The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Nino) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina) is about 0.03°C/decade, amounting to a temperature increase of 0.05°C over that period, but equally we could calculate the linear trend from 1999, during the subsequent La Nina, and show a more substantial warming.

As we’ve stressed before, choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading. Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system. If you use a longer period from HadCRUT4 the trend looks very different. For example, 1979 to 2011 shows 0.16°C/decade (or 0.15°C/decade in the NCDC dataset, 0.16°C/decade in GISS). Looking at successive decades over this period, each decade was warmer than the previous – so the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s, and the 2000s were warmer than both. Eight of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade.

Over the last 140 years global surface temperatures have risen by about 0.8ºC. However, within this record there have been several periods lasting a decade or more during which temperatures have risen very slowly or cooled. The current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented and 15 year long periods are not unusual.

Now, I realize that newspaper reporters are overworked and underpaid.

But it only takes a few minutes a day to follow the latest science on global warming through Climate Progress and other reputable scientific sources. If I can do that, Scott Learn and other reporters who write about this subject can also do it.

Knowing the difference between responsible scientific difference of opinion and climate change denying bullshit is key for anyone reporting on global warming. It's highly irresponsible to pretend there's a genuine controversy among climatologists about whether the planet is warming because of humans.

There isn't. The Earth is getting hotter. Because of greenhouse gases. End of story.

Yet Learn sent me a link to an earlier piece he'd written in April 2012, "Global warming hiatus in recent years spurs skepticism."

Now, 2012 turned out to be the hottest year in United States history. Even Oregon, which along with Washington missed most of the heat that scorched almost all of the other states, had its 13th hottest year in the last 118 years.

The skeptics quoted by Learn in his stories are simply wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. They shouldn't be given any print space in Oregon's largest newspaper. Or any newspaper, except on the opinon and comics pages. 

Chuck Wiese, for example, is utterly unqualified to opine on global warming. He's a meteorologist with a B.A. degree. He's an accomplice of right-wing radio's Lars Larson, as I wrote about in "Lars Larson's lies about global warming."

I survived ten minutes or so of Larson a few days ago, but just barely. The combined scientific ignorance of Lars and a global warming-denying sidekick he had on, Chuck Wiese, was astounding.

And intensely disturbing.

Three years ago I criticized Larson for joking about how global warming is going to be good for Oregon. He's still up to his head-in-the-sand tricks. Now his brain-dead theory is that the Earth is cooling rapidly, so if big bad government limits our nation's carbon footprint, people are going to freeze to death when their furnace fuel is rationed.

Or something like that.

It was hard to follow the logic of Larson and Wiese, since they didn't use any in their blathering about how climate change/global warming science is a fraud.

I'll close with some opinionating which, unlike Wiese and other global warming skeptics, I'll admit rests only on my own subjective impression.

The Oregonian seems to have changed, both editorially and journalistically. I'm a long-time daily reader of the Oregonian. I used to view the newspaper as a highly credible news source, with a moderately liberal-leaning editorial stance.

Now the opinion pages have gotten much more conservative after the arrival of editor Erik Lukens, whose previous job was with the way-right Bend Bulletin. And I sense a similar change of tone in the news section. Perhaps not to the same degree as in the Oregonian editorials, but noticeable nonetheless.

My "conspiracy theory," which, again, I'll admit as such, is that the Oregonian (like most newspapers) is having a tough time making money in this increasingly digital age. It seems reasonable that Oregonian executives would conclude that expanding readership is necessary. 

Which means looking beyond fact-based liberals/progressives, and feeding right-wingers some unscientific, evidence-free red meat on both the editorial and news pages of the sort that excites Fox News viewers. 

Hey, I could be wrong. I just keep reading stuff in Oregonian stories and opinion pieces that make me think, "Wow, that doesn't make any sense." 

Like, there's a possibility global warming has stopped because of recent temperature data. Huh? Recently the U.K.'s "Guardian" newspaper editorialized, "Now no one can deny the world is getting warmer."

Except for a few crazies, who shouldn't be quoted in the Portland Oregonian. I wish Scott Learn and other reporters would take this excerpt from the Guardian editorial to heart:

From this perspective, it might be tempting to sneer at the US over its response to the challenge of climate change. Britain has little to be smug about, however, a point that was demonstrated last week by media coverage of the Met Office's updated forecast of likely global warming over the next five years.

In revising downwards, albeit slightly, its previous expectation for temperature rises from now until 2017, the Met Office found itself at the midst of a PR shambles. In their dozens, climate change sceptics charged forwards to claim this data showed that global warming has stopped, a completely misleading suggestion that was not properly challenged by journalists.

More guns equals more killing. Obvious equation.

Thank you, Elisabeth Rosenthal, for reminding us of an obvious truth that, sadly, is ignored by a disturbingly large percentage of the people in our gun-crazed country: nations with more guns have more gun deaths. 

Duh... 

But sometimes those duh... truths which seemingly shouldn't need to be said so often, do need to be repeated over and over -- when there's a willful attempt to ignore the truth.

The thousands of needless gun deaths in our country, including the recent twenty-six at Sandy Hook Elementary School, scream out Don't ignore me!

So read Rosenthal's "More Guns = More Killing."

She's a physician and science reporter who speaks the truth about what happens in countries where guns are on almost street corner, like the NRA wants to have happen in the United States. Excerpt:

IN the wake of the tragic shooting deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last month, the National Rifle Association proposed that the best way to protect schoolchildren was to place a guard — a “good guy with a gun” — in every school, part of a so-called National School Shield Emergency Response Program.

Indeed, the N.R.A.’s solution to the expansion of gun violence in America has been generally to advocate for the more widespread deployment and carrying of guns.

I recently visited some Latin American countries that mesh with the N.R.A.’s vision of the promised land, where guards with guns grace every office lobby, storefront, A.T.M., restaurant and gas station. It has not made those countries safer or saner.

Despite the ubiquitous presence of “good guys” with guns, countries like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela have some of the highest homicide rates in the world.

“A society that is relying on guys with guns to stop violence is a sign of a society where institutions have broken down,” said Rebecca Peters, former director of the International Action Network on Small Arms. “It’s shocking to hear anyone in the United States considering a solution that would make it seem more like Colombia.”

As guns proliferate, legally and illegally, innocent people often seem more terrorized than protected.

Shoulder-fired missiles don't bring down aircraft, people do. Huh?

Oh, yeah! I'm almost a writer for The New Yorker! My dream.

This might be as close as I get, parallel thinking about gun control between The New Yorker's hugely talented Hendrik Hertzberg and way-less-talented me. 

But, hey, we're on the same track when it comes to making fun of the absurd contention, "Guns don't kill people, people do." Which is so, so, so wrong.

Here's what I said in a blog post on December 29, 2012.

Why don't we legalize surface-to-air shoulder fired missiles? After all, people shoot down airplanes; shoulder fired missiles don't shoot down airplanes. If terrorists don't have a missile, they'll just find some other way to destroy an airplane.

How comfortable would you feel flying on a commercial airliner if you knew that anyone could legally stand along its flight path holding a shoulder fired surface-to-air missile?

If you're an NRA member, logically you should be just fine with this, since your organization favors allowing assault rifles to be owned by just about anyone.

And here's a quote from Hertzberg's "Shots" piece in the January 7, 2013 The New Yorker.

But, for Hobbesian gun nuts of Gohmert’s ilk, the essence of the Second Amendment, when all is said and done, is not about any of that. Its real, irreducible purpose is to enable some self-designated fraction of the American people, in a pinch, to make war against the American government—to overthrow it by force and violence, if that is deemed necessary.

If that’s the line you draw, then where, logically, do you stop? In Georgian times, when the amendment was ratified, the most fearsome weapon anyone, soldier or civilian, could carry was a single-shot musket. And today? “Shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles don’t shoot down black helicopters, people with shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles shoot down black helicopters”?

We think along the same lines, but differ on what sort of aircraft we mention. Surface to air missiles are commonly used to shoot down helicopters, but also other aircraft.

I was picturing a crazed Tea Party patriot standing under the flight path of a commercial airliner as it takes off, about to exercise his Second Amendment rights with a shoulder-fired missile. Hertzberg refers to those dreaded imaginary black helicopters that the U.N. will send in with Obama's help to take our freedoms away.

Same difference. Anyone who thinks assault rifes or shoulder fired missiles are needed by ordinary citizens to defend themselves against the government is so crazy, any example of their insanity works to ridicule them.

Hertzberg makes other excellent points in his essay.

It is indeed disturbingly weird that all those politician gun nuts who want their assault rifes and high capacity magazines didn't have the guts to defend their point of view after the Sandy Hook killings. I guess lies can't be defended when the spotlight of truth is too bright.

Within hours of the unspeakable massacre of twenty first graders and six teachers and staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday, December 14th, bookers for the television networks’ Sunday-morning political talk shows hit the phones, trolling for guests.

They were seeking, among others, politicians, public officials, and prominent citizens willing to defend the proposition that military-style munitions—high-powered semiautomatic assault rifles and pistols that can fire a round every second, use magazines holding as many as a hundred bullets of a type specially engineered to liquefy the insides of human beings, and be outfitted with accessories like grenade launchers, flash suppressors, bayonet lugs, pistol grips, and collapsible stocks—should continue to be readily available to all comers, with or without minimal background checks or waiting periods.

The bookers came up empty.

“We reached out to all thirty-one pro-gun-rights senators in the new Congress to invite them on the program to share their views on this subject this morning,” David Gregory, of NBC, told his “Meet the Press” audience. “We had no takers.”

The National Rifle Association, which had instantly deactivated its Facebook page and silenced its Twitter feed, refused all interview invitations and issued a statement explaining—admitting?—that it was shutting its big mouth “as a matter of common decency.”

When it finally opened that mouth, a week later, out came a demand for N.R.A.-trained guards in every single American school: a hundred thousand schools, a hundred thousand guards, a hundred thousand guns, a hundred million dollars in new business for the N.R.A.’s “corporate partners” in the gun industry.

U.S.A. has more gun violence because it has more guns

There's a simple way to save thousands upon thousands of lives needlessly snuffed out by gun violence in the United States: reduce the availability of guns. 

This is so obvious, it's difficult to understand why so many people say, 'the problem is complicated."

No, it isn't. That's a lie, mostly spread by people who aren't interested in saving the lives of innocents -- including the twenty children and six adults killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School last month. 

So says, Fareed Zakaria, one of this country's clearest-sighted fact-based commentators in The Solution to Gun Violence is Clear.

Read the whole piece, which I've copied in below. It's essentially unarguable. But you can bet that gun fanatics will argue against the unarguable facts. 

Announcing Wednesday that he would send proposals on reducing gun violence in America to Congress, President Obama mentioned a number of sensible gun-control measures. But he also paid homage to the Washington conventional wisdom about the many and varied causes of this calamity — from mental health issues to school safety. His spokesman, Jay Carney, had said earlier that this is “a complex problem that will require a complex solution.” Gun control, Carney added, is far from the only answer.

In fact, the problem is not complex, and the solution is blindingly obvious.

People point to three sets of causes when talking about events such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings. First, the psychology of the killer; second, the environment of violence in our popular culture; and, third, easy access to guns. Any one of these might explain a single shooting. What we should be trying to understand is not one single event but why we have so many of them. The number of deaths by firearms in the United States was 32,000 last year. Around 11,000 were gun homicides.

To understand how staggeringly high this number is, compare it to the rate in other rich countries. England and Wales have about 50 gun homicides a year — 3 percent of our rate per 100,000 people. Many people believe that America is simply a more violent, individualistic society. But again, the data clarify. For most crimes — theft, burglary, robbery, assault — the United States is within the range of other advanced countries. The category in which the U.S. rate is magnitudes higher is gun homicides.

The U.S. gun homicide rate is 30 times that of France or Australia, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and 12 times higher than the average for other developed countries.

So what explains this difference? If psychology is the main cause, we should have 12 times as many psychologically disturbed people. But we don’t. The United States could do better, but we take mental disorders seriously and invest more in this area than do many peer countries.

Is America’s popular culture the cause? This is highly unlikely, as largely the same culture exists in other rich countries. Youth in England and Wales, for example, are exposed to virtually identical cultural influences as in the United States. Yet the rate of gun homicide there is a tiny fraction of ours. The Japanese are at the cutting edge of the world of video games. Yet their gun homicide rate is close to zero! Why? Britain has tough gun laws. Japan has perhaps the tightest regulation of guns in the industrialized world.

The data in social science are rarely this clear. They strongly suggest that we have so much more gun violence than other countries because we have far more permissive laws than others regarding the sale and possession of guns. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 50 percent of the guns.

There is clear evidence that tightening laws — even in highly individualistic countries with long traditions of gun ownership — can reduce gun violence. In Australia, after a 1996 ban on all automatic and semiautomatic weapons — a real ban, not like the one we enacted in 1994 with 600-plus exceptions — gun-related homicides dropped 59 percent over the next decade. The rate of suicide by firearm plummeted 65 percent. (Almost 20,000 Americans die each year using guns to commit suicide — a method that is much more successful than other forms of suicide.)

There will always be evil or disturbed people. And they might be influenced by popular culture. But how is government going to identify the darkest thoughts in people’s minds before they have taken any action? Certainly those who urge that government be modest in its reach would not want government to monitor thoughts, curb free expression, and ban the sale of information and entertainment.

Instead, why not have government do something much simpler and that has proven successful: limit access to guns. And not another toothless ban, riddled with exceptions, which the gun lobby would use to “prove” that such bans don’t reduce violence.

A few hours before the Newtown murders last week, a man entered a school in China’s Henan province. Obviously mentally disturbed, he tried to kill children. But the only weapon he was able to get was a knife. Although 23 children were injured, not one child died.

The problems that produced the Newtown massacre are not complex, nor are the solutions. We do not lack for answers.

What we lack in America today is courage.

Debt limit fight: will GOP pay the bills it voted for?

I'm glad that President Obama is vowing to stand firm on not negotiating over an upcoming increase in the federal debt limit. 

“I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up through the laws that they passed,” the president said Tuesday night after he successfully pushed Republicans to allow tax increases on wealthy Americans.

This is the Obama that progressives hoped we'd see after his re-election victory.

He's a lot more realistic about how you negotiate, or don't negotiate, with unreasonable fanatics who care much more about their own political asses than the wellbeing of their country. And Obama is speaking more clearly, in simpler sentences.

Absolutely correct: the choice for Congressional Republicans is whether they pay the bills for spending they voted for. That's what every other Congress has done, until the last dysfunctional GOP debt limit fight that led to a downgrading of our nation's credit rating.

As noted before, raising the debt ceiling should be automatic.

If Congress and the President pass legislation that increases federal spending, and there isn't enough cash on hand in the Treasury to pay those bills, obviously the money has to be borrowed. The GOP controlled House knew that when it voted to pass the legislation.

So its the height of arrogant hypocrisy for the GOP to now hold the United States' "full faith and credit" hostage by throwing a temper tantrum and threatening to not pay bills that Republicans were pleased to incur.

This is like someone refusing to pay their credit card bill after buying a bunch of stuff, knowing full well how much money they had in the bank. Such is today's Republican Party: unethical deadbeats who don't want to take responsibility for their spending.

Obama is taking the right position: you don't negotiate over whether the United States should pay its lawful bills. Now he needs to hold fast to that position when the Tea Party crazies threaten to trash our country's economy.

More proof that "guns kill people, people don't kill people"

To me, and lots of others, it's obvious that guns kill people. My first blog post on this subject contains inarguable facts to that effect.

The United States has 35-50% of the world's civilian owned guns, but only about 5% of the world's population. We rank #1 in firearms per capita. Our intentional homicide rate is three times that of Canada. Our firearm-related death rate is five times that of Canada. 

State comparisons lead to the same conclusion: guns kill people; people don't kill people. States with strong gun laws and low rates of gun ownership have the lowest firearm death rates.

Yet the NRA wants more guns floating around, not fewer.

It is calling for armed guards in every school. Some Republican legislators want teachers to be able to have a gun in the classroom. Though the facts show that more guns equals more gun deaths, this isn't convincing those who consider that the only way to stop gun violence is to arm the public more heavily.

(The NRA should start a weight-loss program with the same philosophy: the more you eat and the less you exercise, the thinner you'll be. When dieters see how well that adage works, hopefully the absurdity of the NRA's similar theory about gun violence will be apparent.)

I'm a realist. I understand that many gun lovers are impervious to facts. So here's a couple of other ways to look at the issue of gun violence being largely caused by gun availability.

Why don't we legalize surface-to-air shoulder fired missiles? After all, people shoot down airplanes; shoulder fired missiles don't shoot down airplanes. If terrorists don't have a missile, they'll just find some other way to destroy an airplane.

How comfortable would you feel flying on a commercial airliner if you knew that anyone could legally stand along its flight path holding a shoulder fired surface-to-air missile?

If you're an NRA member, logically you should be just fine with this, since your organization favors allowing assault rifles to be owned by just about anyone.

Here's another thought experiment:

Imagine that you're attending an event where there's going to be a lot of argumentative emotion involved. Political debate. Crucial soccer match. Pro- and anti-abortion rallies on adjacent street corners.

There's also intoxication involved. Free beer. Free amphetamines. Anything you want to alter your consciousness with. Just like real life (except the drugs are provided at no cost).

As you approach the event, you see that all the attendess are being channeled through lines where they get some complimentary gifts. Knowing that you're going to be spending several hours with many emotionally aroused, intoxicated people, how comfortable wouid you be knowing that people are carrying around:

A New Year's Eve type noisemaker, or...
A pocketknife, or...
A baseball bat, or...
An assault rifle loaded with a 100 round magazine?

Remember what the NRA says. Guns don't kill people; people kill people. So if you support the NRA, you should feel just fine in a crowd of emotionally fired-up drunk or drugged people, all carrying assault weapons. 

Or would you? Maybe the baseball bat or pocket knife would make you feel more comfortable. Or how about no weapons at all at the event, just noisemakers people could use to express themselves?

Think about it. Be honest.

Then remember the twenty children killed this month at Sandy Hook Elementary School by an assault rife. Ask yourself how you'd feel if the killer had carried a baseball bat or pocketknife instead.

Fiscal cliff crisis shows need for Taleb's "antifragility"

I gave myself Antifragile for Christmas. My wife wrapped it up after I handed her the Amazon box. I've been happily reading the book for the past few days. 

The subtitle of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's lastest work (he wrote The Black Swan) drew me in: "things that gain from disorder."

What a marvelous notion.

Fragile things break when stressed. Robust things stay the same when stressed. And antifragile things benefit when stressed -- like Hydra, which grows two heads whenever one is cut off, or bones, which get stronger when they support heavy weight.

Several chapters in, Taleb is well on the way to converting me to embracing the glory of antifragility. It fits with my Taoist leanings. But is somewhat (or maybe a lot) at odds with my progressive politics. 

Taleb isn't a fan of big bureaucratic government.

However, neither is he a fan of big bureaucratic corporations. Taleb persuasively argues that failure, mistakes, errors, and other unpredictable events not only aren't a problem for antifragile systems, they make those systems stronger.

Yet here we are once again, anxiously watching politicians in Washington grapple with a serious fiscal problem, waiting until the last minute to find a possible way to deal with it, our economy poised to nose-dive if agreement can't be reached between leaders of two political parties who rarely agree on anything these days.

I saw the title of this New York Times op-ed before I saw the author's name. "Stabilization won't save us" made me think, this sounds like something Taleb would say. I was right. He wrote the piece, beginning with:

THE fiscal cliff is not really a “cliff”; the entire country won’t fall into the ocean if we hit it. Some automatic tax cuts will expire; the government will be forced to cut some expenditures. The cliff is really just a red herring.

Likewise, any last-minute deal to avoid the spending cuts and tax increases scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1 isn’t likely to save us from economic turmoil. It would merely let us continue the policy mistakes we’ve been making for years, allowing us only to temporarily stabilize the economy rather than address its deep, systemic failures.

Stabilization, of course, has long been the economic playbook of the United States government; it has kept interest rates low, shored up banks, purchased bad debts and printed money. But the effect is akin to treating metastatic cancer with painkillers. It has not only let deeper problems fester, but also aggravated inequality. Bankers have continued to get rich using taxpayer dollars as both fuel and backstop. And printing money tends to disproportionately benefit a certain class. The rise in asset prices made the superrich even richer, while the median family income has dropped.

Overstabilization also corrects problems that ought not to be corrected and renders the economy more fragile; and in a fragile economy, even small errors can lead to crises and plunge the entire system into chaos. That’s what happened in 2008. More than four years after that financial crisis began, nothing has been done to address its root causes.

Our goal instead should be an antifragile system — one in which mistakes don’t ricochet throughout the economy, but can instead be used to fuel growth. The key elements to such a system are decentralization of decision making and ensuring that all economic and political actors have some “skin in the game.”

Makes sense. 

I really like the idea of embracing mistakes. The "gotcha" game in politics is disgustingly unproductive. Every time I hear another mention of the State Department failing after the successful Benghazi attack, I feel like screaming at whoever is making that claim, have YOU ever made a mistake, dude?!

Mistakes are part of life. Chaos is a part of life. Disorder, unpredictability, bad shit happening -- these are all parts of life.

Antifragile systems thrive on all of this. Fragile systems don't. Unfortunately, the United States economy is excessively fragile at the moment. The fiscal cliff (or fiscal slope, take your pick) threatens it.

Like Taleb says, it'd sure be nice to know that whatever politicians in Washington, D.C. do or don't do, whether they make wise or foolish decisions, whether they do the right or wrong thing, our country would continue to prosper.

But if it doesn't, for either a brief or lengthy period, I like Taleb's mention of "skin in the game."

If Republicans won't compromise with Obama; if they persist with anti-growth policies; if they refuse to raise the debt ceiling and cause the U.S. credit rating to be downgraded -- they they need to own what they've broken.

Must be some way to tie politicians' compensation/reputation/power to key economic indicators, like inflation, unemployment, interest rates, national credit rating. If the GOP screws these up, Republican politicians should pay the price.

I'm looking forward to reading the rest of Antifragile. Taleb is a highly creative thinker.

I like his in-your-face blunt writing style, though I can understand why some reviewers don't. Am sure I'll have more to blog about once I get further in his book. 

Amazing photo of Mt. Everest inspires...and despairs

Here's Mt. Everest like you've never seen it before, in 3.8 billion pixels -- an amazingly detailed panoramic photograph of Everest and the surrounding region.

Have a look. 

This composite of 400 + images looks great on my 13 inch retina MacBook Pro. But regardless of how crisp your computer screen is, I bet you'll be as fascinated by the photograph as I was. (I've had some problems, though, getting the green hot spots to zoom correctly after being clicked.)

small portion of actual photograph

When I first came across the photo I spent about 20 minutes exploring the landscape. I'm now hugely more impressed with anyone who climbs Everest. Any slope I looked at seemed super-scary, some more than others.

Cliffs abound. That got me all quasi-philosophical, thinking about the "fiscal cliff" which politicians are tackling in Washington D.C. these days. 

Believe me, there's no cliff like Everest's cliffs.

If we humans can team up cooperatively and figure out how to climb Mt. Everest, we damn well should be able to resolve social policy problems -- metaphorical mountains rather than real ones.

However, David Breashear, who created the photograph, has another project which is more of a downer: tracking the Himalaya's melting glaciers.

The Glacier Research Imaging Project, which I helped found, has retraced the steps of some of the world’s greatest mountain photographers as they took pictures — many of them not previously published or displayed — over the past 110 years across the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau. I then returned to those same vantage points and took photographs that bear witness to the rapid warming of the Himalaya and the swift retreat of its glaciers. 

...These then-and-now pictures have a powerful effect on the viewer, one that I hope will bring home the reality — and serious consequences — of global warming. Gazing at Italian photographer Vittorio Sella’s 1899 picture of the Jannu Glacier in Nepal — a huge ice tongue filling a valley — and then comparing it to my 2009 photo, in which the glacier has disappeared, creates a profound sense of unease.

And we should be uneasy. The loss of these frozen reservoirs of water will have a huge impact, as the glaciers provide seasonal flows to nearly every major river system in Asia. From the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra in South Asia, to the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in China, hundreds of millions of people are partially dependent on this vast arc of high-altitude glaciers for water. 

Facticity is a wonderful word which Breashear's photographs bring to mind. I'm not familiar with the precise philosophical meaning of the word. I just like how it brings attention to the brute fact'ness of physical existence.

We can make up all kinds of crap in our minds: ideologies, theologies, all kinds of abstractions which usually have little connection with "facts on the ground," reality minus our wishful thinking about it.

The Earth is warming.

I don't know if the panoramic Everest photograph shows the melting of ice and snow that Breashear is so concerned about. Probably it does. I was surprised by how rocky and ice-free much of the terrain was. 

Facticity.

Everest can't be climbed without respecting the fact of it. Denial of what is, looking the other way at a more alluring what I hoped it was, leads nowhere good, nowhere productive.

We need more people like Breashear, people committed to revealing the truth about phenomena which aren't understood as well as they should be. Everest. Global warming. Gun violence. Deficit reduction.

Facts matter. There's a way to climb every mountain, both physical ones and metaphorical ones. First, though, we have to know the reality of what we're trying to surmount. 

NRA and Wayne LaPierre are "lobbyists for mass murderers"

I just finished watching Lawrence O'Donnell's spot-on commentary about the NRA's shameful commitment to arming mass murderers with the most powerful available weapons. 

Watch it.

Especially if you're a NRA member. This is what you're supporting with your NRA dues: mass murder. If you don't want to be an accomplice to the next killing of innocent children, cancel your NRA membership.

Truth is powerful. O'Donnell speaks the truth. Truth-telling can change the world. I sure hope it brings about changes in our gun laws.

Other countries have the same video games we do. Other countries watch the same Hollywood movies we do. Other countries have the same mentally ill we do. 

Only the United States, ONLY the United States, among the world's industrialized nations, has vastly higher rates of gun violence. Because we have vastly more guns, including assault weapons and high capacity magazines.

Face this fact: the NRA is a lobbyist for mass murderers, assuring they have the deadly tools of their trade. Here's the video, following a 30 second ad.

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Obama can't negotiate with unreasonable Republicans

I'm happy John Boehner's "Plan B" approach on the fiscal cliff was shot down by his fellow House Republicans. Now we're back to zero, pretty much, which is a good place for Obama to be.

Progressives have been increasingly irritated at Obama for doing what he said he wouldn't: negotiate with himself. Like Obama said, he's come more than halfway in his talks with Boehner. 

Republicans like to forget that Obama campaigned for re-election on letting taxes go up on the richest 2% of Americans, those couples making more than $250,000 a year. The remaining 98%, which includes 97% of small businesses, would have their taxes remain the same.

Unfortunately, Obama slid away from this position in an effort to strike a deal with Republicans. I believe his last offer to Boehner was to only let taxes go up on couples making $400,000 or more, rather than $250,000.

Now Obama apparently is back to the $250,000 level. Along with extending unemployment benefits and dealing with the sequester thing. Spending reductions and entitlement reform would wait for another day.

Makes sense.

There's no point in negotiating with people who hold onto a non-negotiable position. I've been thinking about this in the light of usual negotiating styles, like when dickering is going on about the price of a car.

The buyer and seller assume that each wants the same thing: to arrive at a fair sales price, to sell the car. But with the extreme House Republicans, and maybe the majority of all Congressional Republicans, this isn't the case.

They are committed to rigid ideologies, not to a common goal -- like improving economic conditions, reducing the deficit, or strengthening the middle class.

Instead, most Republicans have sworn an oath to never raise taxes on anybody. This is akin to the NRA oath of never restricting gun ownership. And the oath of Christian fundamentalists to never doubt the veracity of the Bible.

Psychological research has shown that conservatives are more prone to rigid right-wrong thinking than progressives. They have a need to clutch the security blanket of certainty, even when they don't have good reasons to believe they're correct.

Negotiating with these sorts of people is like trying to sell a car to someone who doesn't really want to buy a car. He's just pretending that he does. 

House Republicans rejected Boehner's proposal to raise taxes on 0.2% of the richest Americans, those making $1 million or more a year. That's point two percent, not two percent, point two. One freaking fifth of a percent, and the no-tax nuts said "No!" 

Because they're wedded to No Tax Increases Ever, an eleventh commandment for most Republicans. Crazy. It isn't possible to negotiate with crazy people. Obama shouldn't even try.

There's no longer any reason to take Republicans seriously. They aren't interested in solving this country's problems, just in hanging on to their personal rigid dogmas.

If they are OK with taxes going up on 98% of Americans, let the GOP live with that. If they are OK with the United States defaulting on its debt, creating economic catastrophe, let the GOP live with that.

You break it; you bought it. The GOP needs to own the consequences of its inflexibility.

Taxes are going to go up on 98% of Americans on January 1. Obama and the Democrats want that tax increase stopped before the year ends. He keeps asking Republicans to lower taxes for the vast majority of Americans, something the GOP supposedly is in favor of.

If Republicans do nothing before January 1, taxes will go up. Guaranteed. That's how the law was written by George Bush and Republicans. No excuses. No action by the end of the year, the GOP owns a huge tax increase.

Same deal with the upcoming raising of the debt ceiling.

As I noted in a recent blog post, until the Tea Party crazies got into Congress, raising the debt ceiling used to be virtually automatic. After all, all this does is enable the United States to pay what it owes, what Congress has agreed to spend. It has nothing to do with the deficit or future spending.

So if the GOP doesn't want to increase the debt ceiling fine. See what the consequences for this country's credit rating is, and how this affects the economy. If Republicans think it's a great idea for the United States to default on some of its obligations, go for it. 

Again, you break it, you own it. That's how you negotiate with someone who is inflexible. Make them own the consequences of their rigidity.